Jon M. Chu thinks television gives 'Crazy Rich Asian's "more real estate" than another movie.
The 'Wicked' filmmaker is working on a follow-up to the 2018 blockbuster comedy - which starred Michelle Yeoh, Constance Wu, Gemma Chan and Henry Golding - and he has explained the decision to move ahead with a sequel series on Max instead of a new film.
He told The Hollywood Reporter: "We needed more real estate, that was the reality.
“We developed the movie over and over and over again and we’re still working on a version of something that I won’t talk about now, but the TV landscape allowed us to use all the characters.”
The show will be based on Kevin Kwan's novels 'Crazy Rich Asians', 'China Rich Girlfriend' and 'Rich People Problems'.
His co-writer Adele Lim will serve as a showrunner for the series, having previously stepped back from a planned film in 2019 amid claims Warner Bros. offered her a fraction of the salary offered to co-writer Peter Chiarelli, who is a white man.
Chu insisted there could still be a sequel film in the future, but this project made more sense as a series.
He added: "I don’t know if it’s in lieu of a sequel but it felt clear that every character we wanted to explore needed more room and just a movie wasn’t doing it for us.
“We got to bring Adele back into the fold and so we’re starting this now, it’s going to be fun.”
Back in November Chu played down the idea of a second movie.
He told The Hollywood Reporter, Chu said: “There are a lot of questions about ‘Crazy Rich Asians 2’ . I always promised the cast, I will not bring them back unless we get a script that’s better and has as much urgency as the first movie. And I think we just haven’t gotten there yet.
“The first movie, even though people think, ‘It’s like the book, so the second book should fit in’, it’s actually not. There’s a lot of shifting, architecturally, and so it’s not a straight translation.
“And then there are characters that you want to see in a movie that are part of the book. We’ve done some versions and it’s never quite hit.
“The bar is high for all of us to come back to do that, so I’m not going to put the audience through that until we’re ready to do it.”
'Crazy Rich Asians’ - which also starred Awkwafina, Sonoya Mizuno and Ken Jeong among others - follows Rachel Chu who travels to Singapore with her long-time boyfriend Nick for his best friend’s wedding, where she learns her partner comes from an extremely wealthy family and is considered one of the countries most eligible bachelors.
After this comes to light, Rachel must content with a flurry of jealous women, Nick’s eccentric family and his disapproving mother.
