Meryl Streep is still nowhere to be found in the “present-tense” footage of this new Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again trailer. It’s a little ghoulish to consider that Universal/Comcast Corp.’s marketing campaign is essentially using “Is Donna dead and how did she die?” as a kind of mystery to drive interest in this musical sequel, but I won’t pretend that I don’t approve. A) I do admire the chutzpah and B) whatever gets them in the theater on July 20, right?
I’ve seen countless folks online asking some variation of “Why are we getting a sequel to Mamma Mia?” and the answer is essentially: “Money, money, money (it’s a rich man’s world).” The first Meryl Streep/Amanda Seyfried (and many, many others) musical adaptation of the popular ABBA-driven stage show opened right alongside The Dark Knight and earned $28 million right as the Batman sequel was nabbing a record-breaking $158m Fri-Sun frame (insert obligatory Space Chimps joke HERE). The flick earned $144m domestic but went bonkers overseas, earning $465m outside of North America.
That was the third-biggest overseas performance of any movie in 2008, just $4m shy of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and The Dark Knight, both of which earned $469m outside of North America. Let me repeat that for the cheap seats: Mamma Mia!, a female-led (and female-directed) musical made more money overseas than Iron Man, Hancock, Quantum of Solace and Kung Fu Panda and earned just $4m less than The Dark Knight and Indy 4. The film earned more worldwide that year than Iron Man and Quantum of Solace. That’s why we’re getting a sequel.
The film’s $609 million worldwide gross made it the biggest-grossing live-action movie ever with a female director, up until Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman just last summer. So of course, it makes sense that director Phyllida Lloyd (a theater director who helmed the 1999 stage show) has barely worked since in the industry then and has been replaced with a dude (writer/director Ol Parker) for this sequel. I will offer the benefit of the doubt and presume that Parker (who wrote The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and directed the Dakota Fanning cancer drama Now Is Good) created the project from scratch or made a successful pitch, but it’s still an icky look.
General audiences won’t care about who wrote or directed the movie, and fans of the source material won’t care much either. Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is one of those sequels that can earn a lot less than its respective predecessor and still make a mint. Even an Alice Through the Looking Glass plunge gets this (presumably) over/under $50 million sequel (the first film cost $52m in 2008) to $178m worldwide. Or it’s entirely likely that this Mamma Mia sequel will play like Fate of the Furious, Bridget Jones’ Baby and (possibly) Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, whereby it takes an expected domestic plunge but holds its ground overseas for a relatively similar global cume.
And yes, sad to say, it’s just as noteworthy for us to be getting a female-led major studio musical in the middle of the summer in 2018 as it was in 2018. Of course, Universal has stepped up their game with female-centric popcorn entertainments over the last ten years, just as much as Disney. A few more of these films directed by women would be nice, but that’s the next step. And Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again may yet thrive this summer positioned amid a flurry of testosterone-fueled action movies like Denzel Washington’s The Equalizer 2, Dwayne Johnson’s Skyscraper, Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible Fallout and Mark Wahlberg’s Mile 22.
Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, starring (deep breath) Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgård, Julie Walters, Dominic Cooper, Amanda Seyfried, Christine Baranski, Lily James, Josh Dylan, Hugh Skinner, Jeremy Irvine, Alexa Davies, Jessica Keenan Wynn, Andy Garcia and Cher, opens July 20 in North America. As always, we’ll see.
