Last year marked the 20 YEAR anniversary(!) of Edgar Wright’s zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead, which paved the way for Wright to become a top filmmaker in Hollywood and also introduced Simon Pegg and Nick Frost to American audiences. The trio re-teamed on Hot Fuzz and The World’s End, but what about a sequel […]
Last year marked the 20 YEAR anniversary(!) of Edgar Wright’s zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead, which paved the way for Wright to become a top filmmaker in Hollywood and also introduced Simon Pegg and Nick Frost to American audiences. The trio re-teamed on Hot Fuzz and The World’s End, but what about a sequel to Shaun of the Dead?
Fans of the horror-comedy have been begging for a follow-up since the film was released in 2004, but Pegg explains why it’ll likely never happen in a Reddit AMA this afternoon.
Pegg explains, “I think it’s best left alone. I don’t think there’s any point in rebooting it. Some stories just have a beginning, middle and end. And the trouble with sequels sometimes, is that you have to undo the resolution of the original film in order to start another story.”
“With films like Mission: Impossible, or the kind of superhero genre, or Star Trek, it works because it’s a continuing adventure,” he continues. “But with Shaun of the Dead, Shaun has an arc that he starts somewhere and ends somewhere. And we’re happy with the way that ends. And I that think sometimes, when you sequelize a film like that, you can end up spoiling the original, because when you watch the original again, you’re thinking, ‘Well they’re gonna go through this other thing.’ The resolution stops having any meaning.”
He ends the response on a definitive note, “So, no, is the answer to that question!”
Edgar Wright had a similar answer to the same question back in 2021. He told SFX Magazine, “I haven’t gone back to horror-comedy, because with Shaun of the Dead I felt like I had said much of what I wanted to say with that movie. The thing is that films take so long to make. I think that’s the thing that fans don’t quite understand sometimes. They’ll say, ‘Why don’t you knock out a Shaun sequel?’ It’s like, these films take three years to make, you’ve got to really, really love it to do it. So because films take longer to make, trying to challenge yourself with a different subject matter or something you haven’t done before, it’s always the real motivator.”
