Although he’s made critically acclaimed films for more than 15 years, Baby Driver was far and away Edgar Wright’s biggest commercial hit to date. It grossed $228 million worldwide, almost tripling the previous highest gross of his career (Hot Fuzz, which earned $81 million worldwide.) Naturally, the powers that be wanted to turn Baby Driver into a franchise. And Wright even wrote a screenplay for a sequel. But that doesn’t mean he’s going to make it.
In a new interview with (ahem) Interview Magazine, Wright reveals that his decision to make his latest movie, Last Night in Soho, grew out of Baby Driver’s success, and his determination not to repeat himself with another film just like it. “At the time when Baby Driver was out,” Wright explains, “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.”
As for the Baby Driver 2 script and whether he still might do it, Wright says there’s something he’ll need to “find” before he agrees to direct:
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. 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. My rule of thumb is you have to really want to do it.
It sounds like if a Baby Driver 2 ever happens, it would have to be very different from Baby Driver 1. Which could be fun; sequels that diverge from their predecessors are usually a lot more interesting than ones that don’t. Meanwhile, Last Night in Soho is now in theaters.
10 Sequels That Are Better Than The Original
While it’s not easy for a sequel to surpass the original film in terms of quality, it does happen every once in a while. Here are 10 sequel films that are better than their predecessors.
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