NOTE: This post will contain spoilers for Talk to Me.
Michael and Danny Philippou’s Talk to Me hit theaters this past weekend, where it pulled off a fairly incredible feat: despite opening in a crowded theatrical marketplace caught in the throes of Barbenheimer mania, this little Australian horror indie (made for less than $5M) managed to double its projected box office take, raking in $10M for distributor A24. Given that immediate success, it’s no surprise that people are already floating the idea of a sequel … but does a sequel make sense?
Depends! On the one hand, Talk to Me tells a fairly encapsulated story, one with a definitive ending for its lead character, Mia (Sophie Wilde): she’s dead now, caught in the same spirit realm that she and her friends had been contacting throughout the film. At last we see her, she’s been summoned by an entirely different group of dipshit teenagers. That would seem to bring the Talk to Me saga to a close, no?
Well, not necessarily! In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Michael and Danny Philippou weigh in on whether they’d be interested in making a sequel … and what shape that might take if they did.
Says Danny:
“Part of me is like, ‘Yeah, maybe it is done.’ The other part of me is like, ‘Oh, my God. Give me a sequel, please.’ I’ve got these set pieces that I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, I so badly want to shoot this. This is the coolest thing ever.’ So, if A24 came to me and said, ‘You know what? We’d like a sequel.’ I wouldn’t be able to resist. I’d want to do it so bad.”
Adds Michael:
“I guess a question would be, would you continue the story around Mia and those characters, or do you go to another part of the world? That’s a debate.”
Now that’s the ticket! Talk to Me might tell a self-contained narrative, but that doesn’t mean the lore established in the film couldn’t be explored in some other city, in some other part of the world, with some other new cast of characters. Sophie Wilde might not return as Mia (though we’d love to see her make a cameo), but that doesn’t mean there’s not plenty more to explore within the boundaries of the Talk to Me world … and it seems like the Philippous are already prepared for that: THR’s post mentions that they’ve got a “thick” lore bible standing by, one that covers all the in’s and out’s of Talk to Me‘s severed-hand mythology. Let’s explore that space!
As of this writing, there’s been no official word on A24’s interest in a Talk to Me sequel, but rest assure we’ll keep you informed if and when any updates occur on that front. In the meantime, the Philippou brothers will get to work on their already-announced Street Fighter movie for Legendary Pictures.
Talk to Me is now in theaters. You should go see it.
