Reese Witherspoon finds unexpected inspiration for Elle Woods’ next big moment.
Witherspoon spoke to USA today for an interview published Friday, in which she teased the development status for the much-discussed third film in the legal blonde franchisee. The star said she remains hopeful that the sequel will still take place and that the recent success of Top Gun: Maverick helped stimulate ideas for her own film’s team.
“I still hope that” Legal Blonde 3 is going to come together in the right way,” she said. “It’s just like Top Gun: They waited a long time to make another version of that movie, and I loved the nostalgic piece they put into it. So that certainly gave us a lot of inspiration about what we would like to do with Elle Woods and make sure we had all those touchstones that were important to people [back] then.”
Witherspoon continued, “I feel like these characters are my friends, so I protect them. I would never make the undersized, mediocre version of their story.”
Top Gun: Maverick finally in cinemas in May, 36 years later Tom Cruise first starred as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in the original 1986 blockbuster. Independent thinking persondirected by Joseph Kosinski, the billion dollar mark at the worldwide box office, becoming Cruise’s first film to do so, and earlier this month reaches $600 million in your own country.
Director Robert Luketic’s legal blonde introduced audiences to Witherspoon’s unlikely Harvard Law student, Elle Woods, when it debuted in theaters in July 2001. A sequel followed two years later.
witherspoon confirmed in 2018 that she was in talks to reprise her role as Elle for Legal Blonde 3and two years later, Mindy Kaling and Dan Goor signed on write the screenplay. Later in 2020, MGM posted on its official Twitter account announcing a May 2022 release date for the movie; the project currently has no planned release.