One of the recurring gags from Shawn Levy’s Free Guy was the desire on any major industry’s part to continue churning out sequels and repeating what works at the expense of originality, so the video game-inspired blockbuster was always going to end up becoming an ironic victim of its own success.
A box office haul of $331 million makes it the second highest-grossing movie released since 2019 that wasn’t based on a pre-existing IP or concept, with Christopher Nolan’s Tenet taking top honors. As a result, Disney were eager to get Levy and star/producer on board for a second installment as soon as possible, but the duo aren’t planning to rush.
Instead, they’ve got The Adam Project coming to Netflix in a couple of weeks, and in an interview with Collider, Levy said he’s got no intention of returning to the world of Free City for the sake of a cheap cash-grab.
“We loved Free Guy. We were thrilled that Free Guy was as successful as it was, and particularly as an original movie at a time where few get made and even fewer are hits. So that was gratifying. And if we can crack that sequel, that’s something that might be very fun to make together. I’ve definitely gotten that phone call. I don’t know how to quantify the how much, but that exact phone call that you just basically paraphrased, that’s a call.
I’ve gotten a few of those in the past several months. So there is definitely real interest there. But to Ryan’s point, we knew. We had such a clear idea of the tone, the story, the details of Free Guy, and we both made a few sequels in our lives, and so we know how hard it is to make a worthy one. And when we feel confident that’s the kind we’ll make, then we’ll make it.”
Free Guy won rave reviews from critics and audiences, too, and the script was smart and self-aware enough for us to expect plenty of references to the mere existence of a sequel as fodder for humor. Based on Levy’s comments, though, we shouldn’t expect to be seeing the end product for a while.