Baby Driver director Edgar Wright has already written a script for Baby Driver 2, but says he'd need to find a way to make it fun for him before committing to making it.
Update: This story originally misinterpreted Wright's quotes to mean he may not direct Baby Driver 2. We have corrected the error.
During a chat with fellow director Cary Fukunaga for Interview Magazine, Wright revealed that he’s already written the script for a potential Baby Driver sequel:
“If I did the sequel – and in fact I've already written a script – I'd have to find a way to make it fun for me,” he explained. “The idea of doing a straight Xerox is just not interesting because, as you know, these films take at least two years and in our cases, because of the pandemic, they took even longer.”
Baby Driver follows a talented getaway driver played by Ansel Elgort, who’s forced into one last job before he can turn his back on his life of crime. The film was a huge hit both critically and financially – earning $266.9 million from a budget of just $34 million.
It’s easy to see why Sony would want Wright to follow it up with a sequel, but the British director explains how he chooses his projects.
“My rule of thumb is you have to really want to do it,” he said. “We've both been in situations where we have walked away from a studio franchise movie because we weren't feeling it. I know that we share many things in common, and that's one of them.”
Edgar Wright famously walked away from Marvel’s Ant-Man after extensive pre-production work. And while rumours of a Baby Driver sequel began just a month after Baby Driver’s release, Wright was keen to put some distance between himself and the hit action movie.
“I don't think I've ever done exactly the same thing twice in a row,” he explained. “In fact, the reason I decided to do Last Night in Soho was because at the time when Baby Driver was out, it was doing an awards run and got Oscar nominations, and I was getting a lot of pressure to jump straight into doing a sequel. And I just wasn't ready to do the same story again. It was a conscious thing of switching gears.”
Following Baby Driver’s 2017 release, star Ansel Elgort has since landed a role in Steven Spielberg’s upcoming West Side Story remake. As well as writing and directing Last Night in Soho, Edgar Wright also jokingly expressed his desire to regenerate as the next Doctor in Doctor Who.
Ryan Leston is an entertainment journalist and film critic for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.