Paul Feig is feeling confident after helming his first sequel.
The A Simple Favor 2 director recently gave an update on the sequel to his 2018 dark crime comedy starring Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively, which is set during a destination wedding in Capri, Italy, where murder ensues.
“I’m really excited about it,” he told 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 previously announced the sequel in 2022, bringing back Feig, Kendrick and Lively, filming kicked off this spring, with original cast members Henry Golding, Andrew Rannells, Bashir Salahuddin, Joshua Satine, Ian Ho and Kelly McCormack also returning.
Although he tends to “shy away” from sequels, Feig explained why he decided to return to the Jessica Sharzer-penned adaptation of Darcey Bell’s 2017 novel A Simple Favor.
Anna Kendrick, Paul Feig and Blake Lively attend the A Simple Favor premiere on Sept. 18, 2018 in Paris, France. (Bertrand Rindoff Petroff/Getty Images)
“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 said 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) head to the beautiful island of Capri, Italy, for Emily’s extravagant wedding to a rich Italian businessman. Along with the glamorous guests, expect murder and betrayal to RSVP for a wedding with more twists and turns than the road from the Marina Grande to the Capri town square.
The first movie, which grossed $97 million off a $20 million budget, follows widowed mommy blogger Stephanie, who befriends glamorous working mom Emily. When Emily drops off her son and goes missing, Stephanie forms her own investigation into her mysterious friend’s past.