Audiences have been waiting so long for Free Guy that it originally started life as a Fox production, and was one of the few in-development titles to be kept alive after Disney swallowed up even more of the competition. Filming kicked off in May 2019, which was after Ryan Reynolds had shot buddy sequel Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard, but that movie was released almost two months ago.
Shawn Levy’s video game-inspired blockbuster is finally coming to theaters on August 13th, where it’ll play exclusively for 45 days before being added to the Disney Plus library. That’s not a lot of time for a mega budget crowd-pleaser to maximize its earning potential, but we’re hearing from our sources – the same ones who told us Percy Jackson was being rebooted as a streaming service long before it was made official – that sequel talks are already happening behind the scenes.
20th Century Studios now exists as a Disney subsidiary, which provides the Mouse House with greater leeway to continue churning out franchise fare that doesn’t fall directly under their banner, and a high concept action comedy starring Ryan Reynolds that lends itself to all sorts of celebrity cameos and expansive world-building comes with plenty of potential for further adventures.
At the end of the day, though, it’s all about the profit margins, and we’ve been in this position before where sequels get announced and end up never happening. However, if Free Guy lives up to the early reactions that paint it as the summer’s biggest surprise, then audiences could respond in kind by propelling it to the sort of commercial heights that make more installments a prospect too hard to ignore for the studio.
