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You'll never get a sequel to Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, or The World's End, and here's why
Simon Pegg has laid out his reasons why the Cornetto Trilogy won't be getting any sequels, and somehow, Alien 3 is involved
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Everyone loves the Cornetto Trilogy of movies — the three unrelated-but-kind-of-related comedies from Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and Edgar Wright that spans Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World’s End… and many people have wished any of the above might get a sequel at some point. Turns out, that wait is likely to be a very, very long one, as the people involved really don’t want to make follow-ups to any of the three.
“I’m a big fan of sequels,” Pegg told fans at Rose City Comic Con 2024 when asked about the possibility of a Cornetto sequel. “I participate in a lot of films that are sequel-ized. There are certain films that lend themselves to that, because they are about ongoing adventures, you know, like Mission: Impossible — it’s like, it’s missions, there’s one after another. But a film like Shaun or Hot Fuzz, which has a particular kind of character arc where there is a beginning, middle, and end to the story, if you sequel-ize that, you’re gonna have to dismantle the resolution of the previous film, and in some ways, you retroactively damage these films.”
Warming to the subject, he continued, “I have a big bugbear about Alien 3. I know it’s David Fincher’s first film, I know he had a hard job making it, but by fridging Newt and Hicks, he ruined every subsequent viewing of Aliens. You’re watching Ripley go to all that effort to save Newt, and she’s going to die in the next film, you know?”
Going back to the Cornetto trilogy, he said, “Shaun goes through a journey and he reaches that point, and that has to be the end of that story. If we opened it up again, it could ruin Shaun of the Dead. Same with Hot Fuzz, same with The World’s End.” Each film in the trilogy is, in some way, “the sequel to the other films,” Pegg argued.
“Not everything needs a sequel,” he said. “Sometimes we crave familiarity, or we just want to spend some time with those characters again. I think, if you miss them, just go watch the movie again.”
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