When Baby Driver became Edgar Wright’s highest-grossing movie by far with a worldwide gross of $226.9 million, Sony executives began watering at the mouth at the prospect of a sequel. With its unique cinematic style of vehicular carnage choreographed to iPod playlists, Baby Driver is primed to be turned into a long-running action franchise. But the original movie arrived as such a breath of fresh air, it would be a shame if the sequel falls into a familiar rut and just copies what worked in the first one.
Wright confirmed in January that he’s finalized the script for a Baby Driver sequel, and it was previously reported that he’d showed an earlier draft to lead actor Ansel Elgort. It would be tempting for the sequel to repeat the original’s story with Baby getting another getaway driving gig with another band of freelance criminals ripped from the pages of pulp fiction. That story’s a lot of fun, but the first movie already nailed it.
Instead, the sequel should embrace the original film’s surprising ending in which Baby was sent to prison with a lenient sentence thanks to a bunch of laudatory character witnesses. In order to maintain the original’s spirit without stepping on its toes, Baby Driver 2 will have to tell a totally new kind of car-based action story. Richard C. Sarafian’s Vanishing Point has been described as the ultimate car movie, and it could provide the Baby Driver sequel with the perfect narrative framework.
The deceptively simplistic plot of Vanishing Point follows a disillusioned ex-cop and race driver as he takes a bunch of drugs and tears across America in a supercharged Dodge Challenger, relentlessly pursued by the cops. In the Baby Driver sequel, Baby could violate his parole and have to go on the lam with Debora. A road trip story could keep the sequel focused on music and driving without settling into the same familiar tropes and arcs from the first movie.
Wright named Vanishing Point as a major influence on the visual style and direction of the first movie, but due to its urban setting, the original Baby Driver didn’t have a lot in common with the 1971 cult classic. The director took more specific inspiration from Walter Hill’s neo-noir thriller The Driver in telling the story of an exceptional getaway driver with the law closing in on him.
Since all the action scenes in the original movie took place on densely populated city streets, hitting the open road would give the sequel an entirely different visual style. If the sequel takes place in a city, then it’ll limit its ability to distance itself from its predecessor. There are only so many ways to make a car chase through a bustling city look unique. Speeding down a desert highway would make Baby Driver 2 its own thing entirely.
Baby and Debora could even turn into a kind of Bonnie and Clyde pair of antiheroes and go on a Robin Hood-style crime spree while they’re on the road. Criminal couples are one of the most fun tropes of crime fiction, from Badlands to True Romance, and it would be a joy to see Wright’s take on this kind of dynamic.
If the proposed Baby Driver sequel ever comes to fruition, it’ll be the first time Wright has made a proper sequel. Hot Fuzz and The World’s End are technically spiritual sequels to Shaun of the Dead, comprising the “Three Flavors Cornetto Trilogy,” but they all featured brand-new characters in brand-new stories. Wright came up with a treatment for an official sequel to Shaun with co-writer Simon Pegg that would’ve been called From Dusk Till Shaun – apparently, it was basically the same movie all over again, but with vampires instead of zombies – but it never came to pass.
Pegg also mentioned a novel idea for a Hot Fuzz sequel that would essentially flip the original movie’s premise on its head. Where the first movie plucked Nicholas from the big city and placed him in a small town with Danny, the second movie would’ve taken Danny out of his small town and placed him in the big city, where Nicholas is much more comfortable. However, this project also never materialized. Hopefully, the highly anticipated Baby Driver sequel won’t go the same way.
It would be easy for Baby Driver 2 to make Baby a getaway driver yet again, but that would negate his character development in the first movie. A huge part of his arc in the original was his struggle to cut ties with Doc and give up his life of crime. But even if the movie does settle into a familiar formula and puts Baby back at square one, at least we’ll get a fresh batch of nostalgic hits on the soundtrack and a bunch of new breathtaking car chases.