Talk of a Legally Blonde 3 has been floating around for years at this point, and was even officially announced back in October of 20202 for a May 2022 release. As we know, that didn’t happen, and not only did it not happen, the movie hasn’t even started filming. Speaking in a new interview with USA Today, series star and producer Reese Witherspoon offered an update on the sequel and revealed that the success and response to Top Gun: Maverick has served as a major inspiration for the film…should it actually get made. Here’s what she had to say:
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“I’m still hoping that Legally Blonde 3 is gonna come together in the right way,” Witherspoon said. “It’s just like Top Gun. They waited a long time to make another version of that movie, and I loved the nostalgia piece they incorporated in it. So definitely that gave us a lot of inspiration about what we would want to do with Elle Woods and make sure that we had all those same touchstones that mattered to people [back] then….I feel like these characters are my friends, so I safeguard them. I would never make the subpar, mediocre version of their story.”
As film fans may recall, Top Gun: Maverick has become the highest grossing movie of the year and the biggest film of Tom Cruise’s career. Right now the film has brought in over $1.2 billion at the global box office. Hopefully it doesn’t take Legally Blonde 3 as long to get to theaters as it did Maverick.
Officially in development since June 2018, it was previously reported that Mindy Kaling and Dan Goor were set to write Legally Blonde 3. Kaling and Goor were reportedly giving “an entirely new fresh spin” on the MGM threequel’s script which was originally penned by Kristen “Kiwi” Smith and Karen McCullah. Jamie Suk has been tapped to direct. In the time since the film was announced however, MGM has been acquired by Amazon. It’s unclear where the film might fit into their larger plans.
Based on the novel of the same name by Amanda Brown, Legally Blonde opened in theaters in 2001 and quickly became a hit, grossing $141 million at the global box office. The film spawned a franchise of sorts with a 2003 sequel, Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde, a 2009 direct-to-DVD spinoff Legally Blondes, a Broadway musical Legally Blonde: The Musical.
