Hollywood has been fueled by the success of sequels, reboots, and franchises for decades at this point. Before the pandemic, The Walt Disney Company had managed to outdo all of their competition at it when it came to exploiting its franchises. In 2019 alone, Disney had billion-dollar hits from Marvel (Avengers: Endgame & Captain Marvel), Lucasfilm (Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker), Pixar (Toy Story 4), Walt Disney Animation (Frozen II), and even Walt Disney Studios (The Lion King & Aladdin). Time has proven this was a blip and something they haven’t been able to replicate, but it showed that original movies weren’t always their best bet.
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Despite the tremendous success of franchises, this didn’t completely stop Disney from dabbling in original movies. One of these is 2021’s Free Guy, the action-comedy from star Ryan Reynolds and director Shawn Levy, a film that not only became the highest-grossing original movie of the year it was released but which beat out noted franchise entries like A Quiet Place Part II and Cruella at the box office. Original ideas give way to more franchises though, but the world may not see more Free Guy for a very surprising reason.
Free Guy 2 Got Killed By Barbie’s Success
Speaking on The Business podcast with Kim Masters, Levy was asked point-blank if the success of 2023’s Barbie movie killed the sequel to Free Guy. In response, Levy said, “It didn’t help it, it didn’t help it.” Though a sequel to Free Guy was put into development after the success of the first movie, Greta Gerwig’s record-setting movie with Margot Robbie, which saw a fictional character enter the real world and learn more about themselves, put the screws on the plans for Free Guy 2. It probably also didn’t help that Barbie earned a Best Picture nomination and grossed over $1 billion.
“We had some ideas about Free Guy,” Levy revealed. “The one idea that was getting some traction regarding a sequel to Free Guy was sort of done in Barbie, which is to say, the idealistic make-believe character has to integrate into a real world that is wildly dissonant with their own.”
He added, “I don’t know that we’re ever going to see a sequel to Free Guy, and you know what, more and more, I’m okay with that, because it feels very gratifying to make a movie the way you intended and have it beloved. It happened to me on Free Guy, it happened to me on Real Steal, another movie I get asked about a sequel to all the time. It’s okay to just make one movie well and not have it launch anything more than that one movie.”
To Levy’s credit, arriving at the place he has about the success of the film and actually admitting it in a public setting is a major shift in how many in Hollywood talk about movies of this size. Levy being content that Free Guy exists at all and has its fans without feeling the need to find a new avenue to make another is a distinct change for would-be franchises. That said, as he mentioned, Levy does have extensive experience with this already in the form of Real Steel, a film that didn’t even do as well as Free Guy upon release but which continues to flirt with the idea of franchising. Not every movie may need to spawn a franchise, but that’s also not stopping Levy from taking on others.
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