The beloved 1999 romantic comedy Notting Hill could have had a sequel, but writer Richard Curtis has since revealed why that never happened.
Curtis recently shared details about the follow-up movie during an interview, explaining that Julia Roberts was not a fan of the storyline.
It would have seen her character, Hollywood star Anna Scott, divorcing Hugh Grant’s William Thacker.
When asked if he ever considered making sequels to his past films, Curtis spoke of Notting Hill as an example, and said the idea failed to gain traction.
“I tried doing one with Notting Hill where they were going to get divorced, and Julia [Roberts] thought that was a very poor idea,” Curtis told IndieWire.
The writer admitted that this particular concept didn’t live up to the charm of the original.
Curtis added that he felt creatively fulfilled by working on short sequel projects, like the Love Actually reunion he wrote for Red Nose Day in 2017.
The mini-sequel, Red Nose Day Actually, brought back many of the original film’s beloved characters, offering fans a glimpse of their lives 14 years later.
Despite Roberts’ reluctance to revisit Notting Hill in such a dramatic way, her co-star Hugh Grant seemed to like the darker direction of Curtis’s idea.
In a 2020 interview with Collider, Grant speculated about the fate of their characters, joking that Anna and William would have gone through “the ugliest imaginable divorce” involving “really expensive, nasty lawyers.”
Grant took the concept even further during a Q&A session with HBO’s Twitter account, expressing interest in a sequel that explored the emotional fallout of such a split.
“I’d love to do that film,” he joked, imagining a storyline filled with “children involved in tug of love, floods of tears, [and] psychologically scarred forever.”
While fans of the original film might have mixed feelings about such a bleak sequel, Curtis and Grant’s comments offer an intriguing glimpse into what might have been.
But for now, Notting Hill remains a standalone classic.
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