If it seems like it has been a long time since MGM announced a third Legally Blonde movie was on the way, that isn’t just your imagination; the screenplay still isn’t done, and while everyone involved is still on board, writer Mindy Kaling revealed that it’s her own workload that has the latest installment in Elle Woods’s life story moving forward at a bit of a subdued pace. Speaking with Time, Kaling revealed that the movie is definitely still in development, but that it has been pulled from the 2022 release slate and delayed indefinitely while she and co-writer Dan Goor do their best to honor the original with their script.
The biggest concern is nailing a tone that keeps Elle believable all these years later, without robbing her of her appeal. When she was in college, she was perky and a bit flighty at times, but clearly brilliant. Where do you go from there, when she is now a middle-aged person who has been working in her chosen field for years?
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“We don’t want to be responsible for ruining what’s basically Reese’s Avengers franchise,” Kaling told the magazine, adding that some of the questions are “What is Elle Woods like at 42? Does she end up becoming all the things she wanted? How does that personality manifest in a grown woman? Has she become more cynical? Her brightness and her cheerfulness really worked when she was 22, but how has life changed her perspective on things?”
These are not dissimilar to the kinds of questions faced by the writers of 2020’s Bill and Ted Face the Music, which was similarly years in development, and featured cheerfully naive protagonists from a decades-old comedy franchise. Time also drew comparisons to the recent Sex and the City spinoff And Just Like That…, which some say has the opposite effect, laying bare some of the shortcomings of the original rather than capitalizing on what made it great.
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.
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