Anyone with even a passing interest in the buddy movie genre has likely seen Hot Fuzz, the second installment in Edgar Wright’s so-called Three Flavors Cornetto trilogy. Arriving between Shaun of the Dead and The World’s End, the movie is arguably the most accessible of the three given that it riffs on the familiar cliches and tropes of countless action films that most people have seen a thousand times before.
Not only was it the most successful of the trilogy, earning more at the box office than the other two installments combined, but it was also the only one that seemed to lend itself to the possibility of sequels, and the idea of more adventures for Simon Pegg’s Nicholas Angel and Nick Frost’s Danny Butterman would only further the notion that the whole thing is a send-up of Hollywood’s fascination with action-driven franchises.
Every now and again talk circles back round to the idea of a Hot Fuzz 2, but we’re now thirteen years removed from the original and the key creative minds behind the Cornetto Trilogy have all moved on to bigger things. However, in a recent interview, Simon Pegg didn’t completely rule out the idea, although he admitted that fans probably shouldn’t hold their breath.
“I think it’s the one film out of those three movies that lends itself to a sequel, in that those kind of buddy-cop action movies were often sequelized. We already joked about having a Crocodile Dundee reversal of it being Danny in the city, the hypothetical sequel would be Danny and Angel in the big city together. But I don’t know. Edgar and I, when we’ve done something, we want to move onto the next thing. All of those films, they have an arc and then they finish. We made Shaun of the Dead, and the sequel to that film is Hot Fuzz, and the sequel to Hot Fuzz is The World’s End. They’re a thematic trilogy rather than direct sequels. I’d love to play Nicholas Angel again, that was fun. I’m probably too old now.”
With Pegg being a genuine movie star these days after playing key roles in both the Mission: Impossible and Star Trek franchises, and Baby Driver earning over $225 million at the box office and scoring three Academy Award nominations to become the biggest hit of Wright’s career by some distance, if they one day decided that they wanted to move forward with a sequel to Hot Fuzz, then there would no doubt be plenty of studios willing to stump up the cash to make it a reality.