Edgar Wright’s Explanation for Never Wanting to Make Shaun of the Dead 2 Makes Perfect Sense

Should there be a Shaun of the Dead 2? Not now, not ever, director Edgar Wright has insisted — and his explanation for why he has such a hard line on it makes perfect sense.

2004’s Shaun of the Dead, starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, is considered by many fans to be the perfect zombie comedy film. It sees Pegg’s washed up Shaun go from zero to hero as a zombie apocalypse explodes around him and his friends in the Crouch End area of London. Many of its lines are often repeated by fans online (“Let’s go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for this all to blow over”), and it spawned Wright and Pegg’s Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, which includes 2007’s Hot Fuzz and 2013’s The World’s End.

Over the years (21!), fans have wondered whether Wright and Pegg would return to Shaun of the Dead for a sequel. While Pegg has made clear his feelings that a sequel or reboot should never happen, now Wright has added his thoughts.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, he told Polygon he’ll never return to make Shaun of the Dead 2. Why? Because the characters go through their journeys in the first movie, and there’s not really much left to say.

“We weren’t really interested in doing it because we didn’t think there was any more story to tell,” Wright said. Apparently he was asked to make a sequel after Shaun of the Dead came out instead of Hot Fuzz, but he refused.

“There are a lot of franchises where the sequels don’t really earn their keep because all the story has been told in the first movie,” Wright added. “When a character has gone through a massive change, it’s very difficult to have a second installment. Shaun of the Dead has him going from being a kind of sad sack to being a hero by the end of the movie. So it’s very difficult to start the next movie when there’s no obvious arc. We are very happy with it being a one and done.”

With any luck, that’s where Shaun of the Dead will stay: as a perfect movie of its time that still stands up today. No sequel ‘getting the band back together,’ and no remake with ill-judged recasting.

It’s worth noting at this point what Pegg has said in the past about a potential Shaun of the Dead 2. In May, he said that while he’s working out a project to do with Wright, it’ll be a surprise. “It’s lovely to be asked, and the following that film has is the best you can hope for as a filmmaker, but ‘Shaun’ is a story with a beginning, middle and end, and it’s a story that to add it it — like Alien 3 did to Aliens — might end up detracting from the original,” Pegg told Variety. “So certainly when Edgar and I make our next film, we’re gonna really disappoint everybody.”

In the short term, Wright has a reboot of his own, although this one is an adaptation of a novel: The Running Man.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].