In a move that many perhaps didn’t see coming, Amazon Studios may very well be moving forward on My Spy 2 starring Dave Bautista. According to Murphy’s Multiverse the Marvel star will reunite with his co-star Chloe Coleman and writer/director Pete Segal for a sequel to the 2020 feature. As some may recall, Amazon purchased the rights to the film in April of 2020 when content was no longer being released in movie theaters due to the COVID-19 pandemic and while streamers were eager to pick up some of those titles to keep viewers watching while they were stuck at home. My Spy was one of those titles and proved to be a big hit for Prime Video.
As Murphy’s Multiverse reports, production on a My Spy sequel will begin in February of next year and will seemingly shoot in South Africa and Italy, with an eye toward being released at the end of 2023 or in the first part of 2024. In the original My Spy, Bautista plays JJ, a CIA operative that finds himself demoted and forced to watch over a young girl, Coleman’s 9-year-old Sopie, and her family. Precocious as one can imagine, Sophie works out a deal with JJ to have him teach her to be a spy while keeping his cover a secret.
Since starring in My Spy, Coleman has gone on to appear in films like Gunpowder Milkshake and the Amazon Prime Video TV series Upload. She can next be seen in highly-anticipated movies including Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves and Avatar: The Way of Water.
Upon release, My Spy brought in over $7 million at the international box office, which is nothing to sneeze at considering it debuted in July of 2020 amid the height of COVID-19 and long before vaccines would become readily available. Box office numbers for its release in the United States are unavailable, but the film did debut in drive-ins while also streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
Though the original My Spy only holds a 48% critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the sequel wouldn’t be happening if hte studio wasn’t certain it would work. The critical consensus reads: “My Spy plugs Dave Bautista into the ‘charismatic action star meets cute kid’ formula, with generally painless albeit decidedly mediocre results.”