When Free Guy hit theaters in the summer of 2021, it became a sizable hit for Disney/20th Century Studios – the original non-IP movie earning its share of fans and performing well at the box office. The movie’s studio was reportedly so excited about making Ryan Reynolds’ video game movie a franchise that it asked its filmmakers to get going on a sequel the same weekend of its theatrical release. However, two years later, the latest update for another Free Guy movie is not as optimistic, and it has to do with the Barbie movie.
Shawn Levy, the director behind Free Guy, shared some bad news about Free Guy 2 while at the Toronto International Film Festival for his latest project, Netflix’s All the Light We Cannot See. Speaking with Collider about the sequel, the filmmaker said,
I think [a sequel] is definitely not assured. We love Free Guy and the love for Free Guy that has kind of resonated in aftershocks, if you will, in the last couple of years. That's been thrilling to Ryan [Reynolds] and I. We are developing a sequel, but the truth is that you now have Barbie that has obviously left a mark about a character in a fictional world who comes to self-awareness. So, we're only gonna make Free Guy 2 if it's different than the first movie and if it's different from other movies.
Shawn Levy says that while a second Free Guy movie has been in the works, he and the other minds behind the hit are rethinking things following the takeover of Barbie this summer. Apparently, there’s a lot of crossover between the themes they were going to explore in Free Guy and the biggest movie of 2023.
If you’ve seen both Free Guy and Barbie, it’s not tough to imagine how a Free Guy sequel might step on some similar storylines to Greta Gerwig’s mega hit. It’s an unfortunate setback for Free Guy 2 that could very well have its filmmakers going back to the drawing board and delaying the movie further.
Prior to Levy’s unfortunate latest update, 20th Century Studios President Steve Asbell shared excitement for “more Free Guy movies coming” in an early 2022 update, sharing that a script was very much on the way at the time. He shared the sequel had a “fantastic story,” without disclosing the details of what it was about. Following the release of Barbie, which broke some insane records for Warner Bros and made a total of $1.4 billion worldwide, it sounds like the writers may have been looking at each other and realized Free Guy 2 was too similar.
Despite the bad news, it’s great to hear Shawn Levy and the other Free Guy filmmakers are not going forward with a concept for Free Guy 2 unless it’s fresh and new for all audiences. These comments from Levy could mean we’re going to wait longer for another Free Guy, but Levy and Reynolds have a couple of other big projects on which they are collaborating. They are making Deadpool 3 together and a comedy called Boy Band after that. Barbie, meanwhile, just arrived on digital and is hitting IMAX screens for one week starting on September 22.
