Nearly ten years ago, Sandra Bullock pledged she would never again make a sequel to one of her many memorable movies.
It was 2013, the year she and Melissa McCarthy released the buddy cop comedy “The Heat” — which grossed nearly $230 million at the worldwide box office. While simultaneously making the awards rounds for “Gravity” that year, press relentlessly asked if she would return for a second film with McCarthy.
“I’m not doing a sequel to ‘The Heat,’” she said at the time. “I’ve done two sequels. They were horrible. What Melissa and I had was beautiful. We might do another film together. I think we should do a silent film together.”
Film fans and social media users connected the dots, and guessed the two “horrible” sequels Bullock was referring to: the followup to her star-making film “Speed,” which grossed only a third of the original’s domestic box office; and the widely-panned “Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous” (though fans ride hard for the two-hander with Regina King).
On the ground at the SXSW Film Festival with her new film “The Lost City,” however, Bullock told Variety that she is ready to reconsider her position.
“I had a ‘no sequel’ rule when I didn’t have the benefit of fighting for what I really wanted. I feel like, in my old age, I’m learning to fight for the things that I think would be best on screen — and I don’t care who comes away from the meeting angry,” Bullock said.
She credits that evolution to her producing partner Liza Chasin, who helped mount “The Lost City.”
Bulllock called it “the beauty of working with Liza. We are type A. We’ve known each other since the beginning of time. We both take what we do very seriously. We know that no one pays attention to us usually because we’re women. No one thinks that [an] actress is really going to be a producer, so that’s good, they look away and ignore you.”
Sitting beside her co-star Daniel Radcliffe, the actor-producer said she’d be open to a “Lost City” sequel if the script was on point.
“I don’t know that I’d want to do a sequel, but look — we had Dana Fox as a writer. If Dana Fox could come up with something brilliant… there you go,” she said.
Bullock also addressed the late-December news that her Netflix original film “The Unforgiven” had become her second title to crack the streamer’s top 10 most-watched movies of all time, anointing her as something of a Netflix queen. We asked if it came with any perks.
“The perk of Netflix is that hey let me work, and they let me choose material that never would have made it into the theaters,” she said.
Radcliffe asked if the milestone earned her a free Netflix subscription.
“No! I have like a little Yeti cup that keeps my coffee hot. But I think you’re right, I think part of our deal should be that all of our subscriptions should be free, kids included,” she said.
“The Lost City” opens nationwide on March 19.