Downton Abbey has proven to be a box office smash for Focus Features, recording the highest ever opening weekend haul for the studio.
Sure, its $61.8 million gross isn’t going to rival Avengers: Endgame’s status as the highest grossing film of all time. But, the fact it only cost somewhere around $20 million to make means that it has performed superbly.
Of course, as is Hollywood’s wont, this has instantly provoked the question of, will there be a Downton Abbey sequel?
Fans of the period drama will be ecstatic to learn that a Downton Abbey sequel actually looks rather likely now, especially as its writer and creator Julian Fellowes recently admitted that he has some “very loose ideas” for what might unfold in another movie.
“I mean only so that we don’t have to start from scratch if there is one. We know a direction we would go in, ” Fellowes told Digital Spy.
During his conversation with ET Online in the wake of Downton Abbey’s success, Fellowes gave his biggest indiction yet that he is going to expand on these “very loose ideas.”
“To be perfectly honest, having thought the final episode of the sixth series was the end of the whole thing, which I completely did, I then thought the movie was definitely the end of the whole thing. I thought we were saying goodbye to Downton, and that was that,” before adding, “Now we all have to put our thinking caps on again.”
All of the cast of the original series and the movie have insisted that they are incredibly eager to return, too, with Jim Carter, who plays butler Mr Carson, declaring, “If this goes down well and people enjoy it, why not? It gives people a lot of pleasure, the television series gave a lot of pleasure, hopefully this film will. Why not do another one? It’d be a treat.”
Producer Gareth Neame also teased potential plans for a follow-up, remarking, “We’re percolating [ideas]” that are currently in “the back of the mind.” Like Fellowes and Carter, though, Neame insisted that Downton Abbey needed to do well in order for a sequel to even be considered.
Now that Downton Abbey has well and truly exceeded expectations, a sequel seems almost a formality.
