Luca Guadagnino, the gay director of 2017's critically-acclaimed queer film, Call Me by Your Name, told The Hollywood Reporter that he has already begun sketching the beginnings of a CMBYN sequel.
This time, however, the film will take place during the heart of the HIV/AIDS epiemic.
While André Aciman’s 2007 novel of the same name was set in 1987, during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Guadagnino’s film adaptation shifted the time to 1983, shortly after the first case of HIV was ever detected. CMBYN side-stepped the issue of HIV completely, but in the sequel, Guadagnino plans to tackle the AIDS crisis head on.
"I think Elio will be a cinephile and I’d like him to be in a movie theater watching Paul Vecchiali’s Once More," Guadagnino told THR, referencing a 1988 film about a man who falls in love with a man after he leaves his wife. "That could be the first scene [in the sequel]."
The CMBYN novel concludes with 40 pages spanning the next 20 years of both Elio and Oliver’s lives. Guadagnino believes there is absolutley room for the couple’s story to continue, making CMBYN the first possible installment in an ongoing series spanning decades in the characters’ lives.
Guadagnino continued: "[CMBYN] can be the first chapter of the chronicles of the life of these people that we met in this movie, and if the first one is a story of coming of age and becoming a young man, maybe the next chapter will be, what is the position of the young man in the world, what does he want — and what is left a few years later of such an emotional punch that made him who he is?"
All we can say is, yes! Do this and take our money, because God knows all the gays will flock to the theater in droves to see a sequel!
