There’s no getting away from it – 2004’s Shaun Of The Dead is a classic of modern cinema. Part homage, part rom-com, and part social commentary, the movie served the dual purposes of delivering a shot in the arm to the zombie genre, while also kickstarting the film trilogy created by three of the talents behind the British television show, Spaced.
That trilogy – lovingly referred to by fans as The Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy – would go on to involve a police-procedural tale (2007’s Hot Fuzz) and an alien invasion (2013’s The World’s End), but it was Shaun Of The Dead that got the ball rolling. So, when Entertainment Weekly recently revisited the movie, it asked the co-writers – Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright – about the prospect of a sequel.
For his part, Pegg explained that there was actually an idea for a follow-up, which did make it onto paper.
“I jokingly wrote a treatment for From Dusk Till Shaun, which was a sequel to Shaun of the Dead. It was all about Shaun and Ed having to go up to Edinburgh, or something. I don’t know. It was ridiculous. And it was a joke. It wasn’t like a serious pitch. Edgar thought it would be funny to do the film again, but with vampires. But it was all just pub talk.”
Wright also recalled the fleeting exploration of a sequel idea, but also focused in on why it never came to fruition.
“There was a brief idea we had, that we entertained for all of like 72 hours, where I thought you could do an alternate reality sequel. It basically starts with the same movie but then it becomes not about zombies. But these films, they take three years. So, it’s like, if you’re doing another movie, let’s do something completely different.”
As it happened, the output from the collaboration of Pegg, Wright, and Nick Frost created a truly unique trilogy, in which each movie stands alone as an excellent piece of work (Hot Fuzz being entirely flawless), while being threaded together by a recurring main cast and a number of self-references and in-jokes. The fact that the trio chose not to follow through with From Dusk Til Shaun does not mean that their collaboration ends with The Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy, though.
In fact, Wright has confirmed that a future reunion with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost is never out of the question.
“I actually was texting with Simon today, in fact. If we did something else, I think it would be something new, that’s not part of the existing kind of trilogy. It’s really about writing something that we want to do, rather than it seeming like we ought to do something, do you know what I mean? The three movies we made all come from different points of passion. It’s finding what that is and again chaining ourselves to the office to write it. [Laughs] But I would like to work with them again, of course. They’re best friends as well as collaborators.”
Their past work has continued to build a dedicated following, so any project that brings these creators back together in a professional capacity is sure to find success. It just has to fit between Pegg’s Star Treks and Missions Impossible, Wright’s Shadows, and Frost’s Tomb Raider duties. Indeed, Shaun Of The Dead may have arrived 13 years ago, but its legacy continues to reverberate through cinemas – to the benefit of audiences everywhere.
