Edgar Wright has never been one to pigeonhole himself as a filmmaker, with each one of his movies occupying a distinctly different genre, dating back to his amateur spaghetti Western A Fistful of Fingers.
Romantic zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead was followed by buddy cop actioner Hot Fuzz, before he made the jump to Hollywood with the video game-inspired comic book adaptation Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Next up was apocalyptic sci-fi The World’s End, which was followed by heist thriller Baby Driver and psychological 1960s story Last Night in Soho.
Baby Driver was Wright’s biggest commercial success by far, netting over $225 million at the box office and landing three Academy Award nominations. A sequel was announced to be in the works shortly afterwards, and while Wright confirmed earlier this year that he’d written a script, he recently cast doubt on the idea of directing it himself in a chat with Interview Magazine.
“I don’t think I’ve ever done exactly the same thing twice in a row. In fact, the reason I decided to do Last Night in Soho was because at the time when Baby Driver was out, it was doing an awards run and got Oscar nominations, and I was getting a lot of pressure to jump straight into doing a sequel. And I just wasn’t ready to do the same story again. It was a conscious thing of switching gears.
The idea of doing a straight Xerox is just not interesting because, as you know, these films take at least two years and in our cases, because of the pandemic, they took even longer. My rule of thumb is you have to really want to do it. We’ve both been in situations where we have walked away from a studio franchise movie because we weren’t feeling it. I know that we share many things in common, and that’s one of them.”
In all honesty, there’s not really much point in making a Baby Driver sequel at all if it isn’t Wright behind the camera because his style was pivotal the film’s success, so the project will probably be lost to development hell should he decide against returning to the well for another fast-paced crime caper.