Here’s how you know we’re in for a pair of winners in the coming months: Hollywood already has plans to produce sequels for two movies that are still months away from arriving in theaters.
Those two titles would be The Heat and Ride Along, two buddy-cop comedies that are tracking extremely well, according to Deadline, and has inspired their studios to start the wheels spinning on second chapters.
The Heat stars Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy as polar opposite police officers who have to join forces to take down a criminal element. Paul Feig of Bridesmaids fame directs, and the early clips suggest tremendous chemistry between the two funny ladies. 20th Century Fox already showed a vote of confidence in the comedy by moving it out of April and giving it a prime June weekend release date, and now Deadline says that Katie Dippold has been hired to pen a sequel to her original screenplay. Expect the second movie to be fast-tracked if The Heat does as well as expected.
Ride Along, meanwhile, is a Tim Story-directed comedy due in theaters in January, though Universal already must be happy with what they’ve seen. In the film, Ice Cube plays a cop who takes his sister’s fiancée (Kevin Hart) on a ride in hopes of scaring him out of the wedding. Needless to say, things don’t go as planned. The trade says that original Ride Along screenwriters Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi are in “preliminary discussions” to write the sequel. This is great news for two movies that still have a long way to go before hitting theaters. Now I really hope we like the films, and want to see more stories from each creative team.
