Edgar Wright is known for making slightly offbeat movies that don't always appeal to mainstream audiences. This summer's Baby Driver was no different, but it seemed to have an easier time finding an audience than Wright's other projects. The director believes that Baby Driver worked because it had elements that your traditional summer movie audience is looking for, while still very much being an "Edgar Wright movie." According to Wright...
This is still a passion project for me, but at the same time, you can cut a totally commercial trailer for it that will get people in there who haven't seen any of my movies. That, for me, is a win-win: They came for the car chases but there's some other stuff as well, and they like the other stuff.
Baby Driver was an original idea conceived of by Edgar Wright that he was eventually able to turn into a film. Because the movie is full of car chases and pop music, some might think that the film was intentionally designed by Wright to be more mainstream than his previous endeavors, but Wright seems to discount this in his comments to Vulture. He admits that Baby Driver has elements that can be easily adapted into a trailer that makes the movie look that way, but that once the car chases have drawn people into the theater, they also liked the "other stuff," which we assume here means Edgar Wright being Edgar Wright. It's these two things combined that have made Baby Driver a hit both critically and commercially.
Baby Driver is only Edgar Wright's fifth film as a director. The first three were his "Cornetto trilogy" with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost and while those films have built a cult following and were successful financially, that's mostly due to the fact that they had fairly tiny budgets. Wright's Scott Pilgrim vs. the World has an equally cult following, but the movie didn't do nearly as well financially speaking. This makes Baby Driver's success all the more important as Wright is coming off a film that's viewed as a disappointment.
Making movies is always tough because, while the creativity and artistic sides of many films are vitally important, there is always that Sword of Damocles hanging overhead that a movie has to also make money. The best case scenario is when a film is able to make lots of money without having to compromise the artistic vision of the creator and that appears to be exactly what has happened here. And now that more people have been exposed to Edgar Wright's type of filmmaking, it could lead those who had never seen his films before to seek out his previous work or make them more likely to check out whatever comes next.
