Hugh Jackman will likely always be known first and foremost as Wolverine, but the man has had a few box office hits that were not X-Men related, and one of the biggest was The Greatest Showman. There have been fans wondering if we might get a sequel to the movie almost as soon as the first one arrived, and Jackman isn’t shutting the door on the idea, though he recently made it clear there is no plan for such a movie at this point.
Hugh Jackman spoke with Variety at the Toronto International Film Festival, where he was asked about comments from his Greatest Showman co-star Michelle Williams, who said she would love to be involved in a sequel due to how much people, including her own family, loved the first movie. Jackman made it clear that he certainly wasn’t against sequels, but it doesn’t sound like such a film is actively being pursued at this point. Jackman said…
There’s always a chance, I’ve done a few sequels in my time. There’s no plan, there’s no script that I know of yet.
It’s at least theoretically possible that there’s a project in development that Hugh Jackman isn’t aware of. He wasn’t a producer on the first film, just the star, so things could be in early stages working out a plan before going back to him. The movie was made by 20th Century Fox, which was its own studio at the time, but is now owned by Disney. The new studio may be even more interested in a sequel, but certainly the change in ownership changes a lot about making such a movie.
Hugh Jackman has joked that he’s totally against sequels, which is, of course, not at all true. He has said simply that if the story is good, he’ll be interested, so it would seem that all the world needs for The Greatest Showman 2 to become a reality is a story that gets Hugh Jackman excited. The rest will follow, as long as the soundtrack is as hot as the original Greatest Showman.
It’s hard to understate how much people loved The Greatest Showman. The first movie wasn’t simply a box office hit but one of those few films that became a hit through steady box office returns over an extended period. The film was never number one at the domestic box office, it never did better than number three. However, it saw consistent returns over a period of time, spending more than two full months in the domestic top ten.
The Greatest Showman had a pretty satisfying ending, so no sequel is necessarily needed, but the movie, despite being about a real-life person, was also mostly fiction, so there’s really nothing standing in the way of creating a reason to continue the story. And if the soundtrack is as big a hit for the sequel, we’ll have a dozen new songs that Greatest Showman fans will never stop singing.
