Jennifer Grey has teased some plot details about the upcoming legacy sequel Dirty Dancing 2. The original Dirty Dancing, which was released in 1987, followed Grey's character Baby Houseman as she vacationed in the Catskills with her family in 1963. Over the course of the summer, she falls in love with the resort's dance instructor Johnny Castle (Patrick Swayze) and he begins to teach her to dance, culminating in an epic lift move that captured the imagination of audiences for many years to follow. The film was a substantial hit, earning $214 million off a budget of $6 million and landing at #16 on the list of the highest-grossing domestic films of the year, beating out the James Bond film The Living Daylights.
The new film will be the first official sequel to Dirty Dancing, though the property has spawned a veritable franchise at this point between the 2004 prequel Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights and the 2017 TV movie remake starring Abigail Breslin. The film was announced at CinemaCon earlier this year, along with confirmation that Grey would be returning as Baby Houseman. The most recent update came in May, revealing that Nine Perfect Strangers, 50/50, and All the Boys Love Mandy Lane director Jonathan Levine would be boarding the film, his first feature-length project since the Seth Rogen and Charlize Theron rom-com Long Shot in 2019.
During an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Grey opened up about some aspects of what fans will be able to expect in the upcoming Dirty Dancing sequel. She said she has "no desire to remake the first one" and that this film will follow Baby's story "when it's 30 years later and it's the '90s." She is interested in investigating the fallout of the story of the original film and how it looks through a "completely different lens." Read her full quote below:
I'm excited by the challenge of looking at it from the point of view of what happens when it's 30 years later and it's the '90s. What happens with the person that had that experience — what happened to her and what is now relevant about the original story at a different moment, looking at it through a different lens. I think it's, hopefully, really going to satisfy without ever feeling like it's — look, I have no desire to remake the first one or to compete with the first one or to make it better than the first one or as good. It's more about: What's a fresh story to be told?
While she was still tight-lipped about the nitty-gritty details of the project, Grey has let slip some important details about the film. The most important is the fact that the sequel, which is coming out in 2024 (37 years after the release of the original film), will mostly approximate the amount of time that has passed in real life. If it followed the exact length of actual time, it would take place in the year 2000, but any year in the 1990s approximates the three and a half decades well enough to follow up the original Dirty Dancing properly.
Dirty Dancing 2 still largely remains shrouded in mystery beyond that. It seems likely that the film will follow a Creed-style structure, introducing Baby as a mentor to a new troubled teen. Currently, the rest of the cast of the film is unknown, so more story details will likely come into the open when that is announced and the characters around Baby become more fleshed out.
Source: Los Angeles Times