The best argument against releasing a sequel to Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick‘s terrific 1028 thriller A Simple Favor is also the reason the movie is so hotly anticipated. How do you top the original film’s jaw-dropping twists and turns (Incest! Pantsuits! A shared Henry Golding!) without selling out its end-carded happy ending? Should director Paul Feig even try?
Sorry to those who prefer their favorites preferred in amber, because the answer to that last question is “well, he already did.” Since 2022, Feig has been hard at work on A Simple Favor 2, with Jessica Sharzer back as screenwriter. Kendrick, now a lauded kingpin in her own right for assured directorial debut Woman of the Hour, returned to play mommy vlogger Stephanie Smothers. Lively is also back as Emily Nelson, a sororicidal and generally toxic public relations exec.
Speaking of public relations, that’s arguably what Lively’s been up to in recent weeks. Just a few nights before Christmas, Blake Lively took over the news cycle with a set of bombshell allegations against co-star/director Justin Baldoni and the producers of It Ends With Us, that drama-plagued adaptation of Colleen Hoover‘s 2016 novel about the cyclical nature of domestic violence.
After Lively’s claims that Baldoni and his company orchestrated a PR campaign against her were reported by the New York Times, Baldoni, his public relations team, and his studio sued the newspaper for $250 million, alleging that their report on Lively’s California court filing was libelous. On December 31, Lively officially filed suit against Baldoni and his studio, alleging sexual harassment and “a carefully crafted, coordinated, and resourced retaliatory scheme to silence her, and others, from speaking out.”
Damages in that suit are unspecified; via statement, Bryan Freedman, the attorney for Baldoni’s side of the aisle, forecefully denies the allegations. “It is shameful that Ms. Lively and her representatives would make such serious and categorically false accusations against Mr. Baldoni, Wayfarer Studios and its representatives,” he told Vanity Fair last month. “These claims are completely false, outrageous and intentionally salacious with an intent to publicly hurt and rehash a narrative in the media.”
So far, the curveballs thrown between the It Ends With Us parties since December threaten to rival whatever Sharzer might have come up with for her script—and according to false rumors persistently spread across social media (and emailed and DMed to reporters, I’ll personally note) the fracas has prompted Amazon to drop the movie completely.
It’s a claim that makes little sense if you think about it for even a second. Interest in Lively remains high, with many springing to her defense in recent weeks or reexamining why her reputation had recently taken such a beating. Why a distributor would take a film starring a wildly buzzed-about actor and put it on a shelf seems like a bad business decision, at the least.
