Four years after the first film broke box office records, Jon M. Chu’s follow-up has found a new writer to replace screenwriters Peter Chiarelli and Adele Lim. Deadline confirmed that Warner Bros. and Color Force have tapped Chinese-Australian writer Amy Wang to pen the sequel, which will star Constance Wu and Henry Golding. Wang is a story editor on Netflix’s “Brothers Sun,” and has also worked on “From Scratch.” Additionally, Wang is also writing and directing a horror film for Paramount Players/QC Entertainment. Wang has directed episodes of Starz’s “Blindspotting” and Facebook’s “The Birch,” after winning a Cannes Lion award for her short “Unnatural” in 2018. The news comes after “Crazy Rich Asians” co-writers Chiarelli and Lim were at the center of a pay dispute. Lim, a veteran TV writer, exited the sequel in 2019 after it was revealed Chiarelli was paid almost 10 times more, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Director Chu issued a statement at the time saying he stands with Lim but is “frustrated that we all can’t do the next one together” amid contract negotiations. Lead star Golding recently said the sequel was still in the works and that he “can’t wait to get back to Singapore” to film. “I always bug [director Jon M. Chu] about it, and he tells him the same thing every time: They’re trying to figure out the writing,” Golding said. “I know they’re working on it, but hopefully sooner than later.” Now, with Wang as the sole screenwriter, it seems “Crazy Rich Asians” will return on the sooner side. The second book, written by Kevin Kwan and titled “China Rich Girlfriend,” follows Wu’s character Rachel discovering that her birth father was, in fact, a Shanghai elite. Director Chu credited “Crazy Rich Asians” for in part “saving cinema” with onscreen representation. “The medium I love so much is under attack and is shrinking,” Chu said in 2018. “The idea of paying money, fighting traffic and parking, and sitting in a dark room, and giving attention for two hours and saying, ‘Tell me a story’…it’s something I don’t want to die out. We love superhero movies, and there’s a lot of them; and franchises, there’s a lot of them; and there needs to be others for cinema to really reach its full potential.” Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.
