Paul Feig Shares Why He Made ‘A Simple Favor 2’ After Avoiding Sequels

Paul Feig is feeling confident after helming his first sequel.

The A Simple Favor 2 director recently provided an update on the follow-up to his 2018 dark crime comedy starring Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively. The sequel is set during a destination wedding on the beautiful island of Capri, Italy, where a murder shakes things up.

“I’m really excited about it,” he shared with Radio Times. “I’m in the middle of editing right now, and we did a test screening of my first cut last week, and it played through the roof. We scored really high. So it works. It seems to work, which is nice. And now I’m just fine tuning, but I’m really excited about it. And basically everybody came back for it.”

After Amazon Studios and Lionsgate announced the sequel in 2022, confirming the return of Feig, Kendrick, and Lively, filming kicked off this spring. Original cast members Henry Golding, Andrew Rannells, Bashir Salahuddin, Joshua Satine, Ian Ho, and Kelly McCormack are also back.

Though Feig generally avoids sequels, he explained why he decided to return to the Jessica Sharzer-penned adaptation of Darcey Bell’s 2017 novel A Simple Favor.

“I just love those characters,” he told Radio Times. “I wanted to revisit them, and then I had a story idea for, like, a destination wedding in Italy. And when I was thinking about maybe we should do this, it was like, Oh, if I can marry those two ideas.”

Feig noted that Sharzer “took it and ran with it, and then from there, we kept rewriting and doing things to it.”

In the sequel, Stephanie Smothers (Kendrick) and Emily Nelson (Lively) travel to Capri for Emily’s luxurious wedding to a wealthy Italian businessman. However, amid the glitz and glamour, murder and betrayal twist and turn through the event, promising a thrilling narrative.

The first movie, which grossed $97 million on a $20 million budget, centers on widowed mommy blogger Stephanie, who befriends glamorous working mom Emily. When Emily mysteriously disappears after leaving her son with Stephanie, the latter embarks on an investigation into her friend’s hidden past.

Source: Radio Times