Writer/director Edgar Wright says he has ideas for a sequel to the Simon Pegg-Nick Frost buddy cop action/comedy, Hot Fuzz. In 2004, America was exposed for the first time to some ingenious British comedic talent with Shaun of the Dead, which gave the zombie movie genre a refreshingly funny spin. Co-written by Wright and Pegg – and starring Pegg and Frost – the cult hit swung the door open for the Wright and his dynamic screen duo to complete what they dubbed as the “Cornetto trilogy,” a trio of films loosely held together since they each featured Cornetto ice cream from the U.K.
Released in 2007, Hot Fuzz was the second of three films by Wright, Pegg and Frost in the trilogy (which concluded with the 2013 apocalypse comedy The World’s End). The film centered on the exploits of Nicholas Angel (Pegg), an overachieving London cop who’s been reassigned to a seemingly perfect village in the English countryside by his superiors. The job is at first a bore for Angel, but when people start disappearing or dying very violent deaths, he enlists the police chief’s son/fellow officer Danny Butterman (Frost) to start poking around into affairs of the community – and the possible cult that consumes it.
Despite Hot Fuzz’s success, the idea of a sequel was never put into motion. But in an interview for upcoming film Baby Driver, Wright tells MovieWeb that he hasn’t completely ruled out Hot Fuzz 2:
Wright says of the three films in the Cornetto trilogy, Hot Fuzz is really the only one that has sequel potential:
“I’ve definitely had some ideas and me and Simon have even talked about it at points, but it’s that thing of, do I want to spend three years of my life doing that? Or do I wanna, if I have the opportunity to tell a new story, would I do that? If somebody said to me, if Baby Driver 2, if that kind of came up, it would be like, ‘I have ideas.’ I would never say never, and you’re not wrong to say that that’s the one that you could do further installments.”
Clearly Hot Fuzz 2 is not a high priority for Wright, but it’s still exciting to find out that he’s mulling ideas for it with Pegg. But since it’s been 10 years since the release of the first Hot Fuzz, fans shouldn’t be holding their collective breath for a sequel, especially considering how Wright, as well as Pegg and Frost, have had their plates heaping with other projects. Wright obviously dedicates a lot of time to his projects (including some that don’t pan out, like Ant-Man), and if Baby Driver is a success, then there may be even more opportunities for him in the offing.
“It’s funny. I think the thing with sequels is that I’ve always been looking for what’s next? And the thing with any movie is, it’s going to take up at least two years of your life. Maybe three. So, when you’ve got youth on your side, and I’m already in my forties now, it’s like, I guess I would rather be telling new stories than revisiting old ones … Hot Fuzz I think is the only one of the Cornetto trilogy that you could do a follow-up. The tricky thing with a lot of sequels, and especially comedy sequels, is once characters have finished an arc. You know, in Hot Fuzz Danny Butterman especially, Nicholas Angel becomes less of an automaton and becomes more human and Nick Frost’s character becomes less of a simpleton and more of a badass. So then the thing is like, when that’s your starting point for the next one, where do you go from there?”
At the very least, fans of Pegg and Frost have been able to revel in the pair reteaming in other films outside of the Cornetto trilogy in the past few years, including the alien comedy Paul and the upcoming horror comedy Slaugherhouse Rulez. But admit it: It would be fun to see how the community returned to “normal” after the events of Hot Fuzz, and see what Simon Skinner (the brilliant Timothy Dalton) is up to after a miniature church steeple impaled his chin.
Source: MovieWeb
