Will people embrace Another Simple Favor right away or will it take time to find its audience like the first film?

I love A Simple Favor. It’s a movie that totally surprised me on first watch and only got better with time. It’s a black comedy that excels at being both dark and funny, it’s a pitch-perfect satire of true crime and mass-market murder mystery publishing, it features a slew of excellent performances, and top-notch costume design to boot. When a sequel was announced, I was excited but also curious—how do you sequelize a movie with a definitive ending? With a wedding, of course!

The teaser for Another Simple Favor—great title—reintroduces Stephanie Smothers, now a successful true crime author. Gone is Anna Kendrick’s mousy routine, this is Stephanie after outwitting her best frenemy, glamorous working mom Emily. I’m glad that we’re avoiding that sequel thing of resetting characters to who they were in the first film, Stephanie appears to have grown into herself since the events of the first movie.

But we also see Emily, played with bitchy aplomb by Blake Lively, now out of jail and getting married in Italy. This is the crux of the new film—Emily is remarrying, and she wants Stephanie to be her maid of honor. Immediately bonkers, obviously some kind of ploy, Stephanie is deeply suspicious but also unable to resist, the fashion is OUT OF CONTROL, I am into all of it. My only question now is whether or not we’ll see Dennis Nylon again.

Another Simple Favor premieres at SXSW next weekend. We will all be watching for Blake Lively, of course, embroiled in ongoing legal issues with Justin Baldoni and the internet’s current favorite chew toy, but I’m also curious about the audience and critical reaction. I am on the right side of history with A Simple Favor, but a lot of people didn’t get it when it first came out. It wasn’t until the movie hit streaming and people plucked it out of their algorithm and fell in love with its absurd, sardonic satire that it gained a cult following. Now that we know what it is, though, will people embrace Another Simple Favor right away? Or will it, too, have to find its audience?