Filmmaker Shane Black doesn’t sound hopeful about making a sequel to The Nice Guys, and he just explained why in the most likely place for die-hard fans to hear it. The 2016 buddy comedy was re-released on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray in February, and a featurette there includes a new interview with Black. He explained that the rights to the movie are dispersed among studios and distributors, and that getting any of them to agree to fund a sequel would be difficult, let alone all of them at once. On top of that, returning cast members would need a pay raise, including the central duo played by Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling. Still, Black has clearly thought about a sequel quite a bit, and he even shared his plans for the story in more detail than ever before.
“I know the rights situation on The Nice Guys is a bit difficult,” the writer-director said. “Joel [Silver]’s a producer, Warner Bros. is the distributor, there’s an overseas company that Ken Kao is a producer on. So to carve it out and make sure — in other words, can you make the sequel? Yes. Will it be financially feasible once you pay off everyone involved, including the actors getting their bump? That’s the problem, is you’re gonna present something that the actors have to agree to, that’s a good script, and that is going to be very expensive and the studio’s going to say, ‘Well, didn’t the last one sort of bomb at the theaters?’ And you say, ‘Yeah, but we want you to spend twice as much on this one anyway to get everyone back.’”
Later in the same featurette, Black shared his plans for the sequel that he no longer has high hopes of making. “The sequel was going to be any number of things, because ultimately, I come from the time where I used to read about a character named Shell Scott in a series of books by Richard Prather, and the character was so great,” he said. “The capers changed, but you bought it for the character. So it doesn’t really matter what the caper would be in the next movie. We’d find something.”
[RELATED: The Nice Guys Producer Confirms What It Would Take for a Sequel to Happen]
“We had an idea that they go down to Mexico together and we’d set the whole thing south of the border,” he went on. “That was one notion, but we could just as easily have done something else. But once we got those two together and we decided to ‘all systems go,’ there was certainly a script to be had. I still look forward to one day writing that with Anthony.”
Black even went so far as to say that Warner Bros. film executives Pam Abdy and Mike De Luca might be supportive of the project themselves, but that others at the company, including parent company CEO David Zaslav, would push back because of the poor performance of the first installment. “That’s the problem. They can’t just make a decision because they like something. It’s about keeping their jobs,” he said.
The Blu-ray re-release of The Nice Guys is available now. The movie is currently streaming on Paramount+. Despite enthusiasm from fans, there has been no official word on a sequel moving forward.
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