With a box office pull numbering close to $610 million—against a $125 million budget no less—and a swath of positive reviews from critics, it’s clear that the world is wacky for Wonka, and you can almost feel the shift in air pressure as Warner Bros.’ eyes turn into big dollar signs.
Indeed, with the degree of commercial success that Paul King’s musical has had, it’s no big gamble to say that Warner Bros. is ready to turn the Chocolate Factory world into a money factory, and as gross as that sentence feels to say, if it means getting to dive back into King’s imagination, there would surely be few objectors.
As it turns out, there are already some ideas for a Wonka sequel knocking around in the filmmaker’s head, as King recently revealed to ComicBook.com, where he also made the very important note that there are no official plans as of yet.
“It’s definitely something we’re thinking about. One of the things I love most about David Heyman, my producer, is that he has made so many great movies that he doesn’t feel the pressure to just make a movie because it can be made … Of course there are some ideas sloshing around, but we don’t have a story yet, so we’ll see what happens.”
Now, exactly what a Wonka sequel could even look like is anyone’s guess; the film, after all, serves as a prequel to the Chocolate Factory stories we all know, love, and are kept up at night by, wherein we learn how Willy Wonka and his chocolate factory came to be in the first place.
In saying that, we certainly don’t need another film like the Gene Wilder or Johnny Depp-led stories, and King probably isn’t interested in doing that anyway. So, ideally, a Wonka sequel would have to take place between the grand opening of the chocolate factory and the start of the Golden Ticket shenanigans, meaning the most likely plotline for such a tale is the events that led Willy Wonka to descend so crisply into the realm of apathy, that he would go on to accept—even welcome—the deaths of four children in his factory.
Okay, so maybe that’s too far of a cry from this feel-good iteration of the Wonka story, but, as King said, we’ll see what happens.
(featured image: Warner Bros. Pictures)
