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Brie Larson Won't Return for Lord & Miller's Sequel '22 Jump Street'

by Ethan Anderton
July 31, 2013

Besides the surprisingly fantastic teaming of Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill in a hilarious comedy from Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs directors Phil Lord & Chris Miller, one of the finer points of 21 Jump Street was the charming Brie Larson. The Scott Pilgrim vs. the World vixen has made waves in the indie world this year with key performances in films like The Spectacular Now (in limited theaters this weekend), Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Don Jon (coming later this year) and the SXSW favorite Short Term 12, but sadly Larson will not be reprising her role as Hill's love interest in the developing Sony sequel 22 Jump Street.

Larson recently spoke with ScreenCrush and mentioned a meeting with Lord & Miller. She says:

"After speaking with them, it's not something I'm going to be a part of anymore than just in spirit. I will be a virtual cheerleader for those boys doing it again. And I'll be so happy to see the movie and laugh as hard as I did during the first one. It's not necessarily my choice. It's not like they said, 'Would you do it?' and I said, 'No.' That's just the way the story goes."

And that makes sense considering Lord & Miller's recent remarks to Collider about cracking the story for the sequel. Only in the past month did the duo officially decide to direct the film, mainly because they weren't sure they could pull off a good sequel. Miller said:

“People don’t wanna see the same movie that they saw the first time, they don’t wanna see something super different from the first movie, and navigating what that is has been challenging.  We didn’t really sign on to this movie until about a month ago because we didn’t feel like we were sure that it would be a good movie, and then finally we got to a point in the script where we were like, ‘Okay, I believe this will be a good movie.’”

Miller talked vaguely about what Hill and Tatum will deal with as their partnership grows:

"What made the movie take off is when we started to really think about, ‘Oh what’s it like [to be in a partnership?]’ especially because we have a lot to say about what it’s like to be in a partnership, and Chris is married and I have a longtime girlfriend so we have two partnerships.  So really making that thing work seemed like a deeper way to go in that it would create a lot of story possibilities and a lot of comedy.

It’s more about their marriage, basically.  If the first movie is about two people getting together for the first time, this is about what happens if you try to really make the relationship work.  We’ll probably never do another bromance after this one, but we’re trying to get as emotionally deep into that as possible.”

The bromance between Tatum and Hill was so genuinely charming, it's easy to see why Larson may not be needed when the focus will be on the development of our heroes' relationship. Lord added an interesting details saying that Hill is, "basically plays a teenage girl for most of the film." Maybe Tatum gets a love interest this time and Hill starts to get jealous. Or maybe the duo has to team-up with another undercover outfit, and Tatum develops a bond with someone else. We'll have to wait and see. Oh, and in case you're wondering about the sequel title, "It’s called 22 Jump Street because they move across the street.”

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