Kristen Wiig Will Direct Bridesmaids Follow-Up

Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, the women behind the 2011 hit Bridesmaids, are writing another comedy, which Wiig will likely direct.

Wiig and Mumolo plan to write, produce and star in the film about friends who “find themselves out of their depths,” the New York Times reports. This will be the former Saturday Night Live star’s first directing gig.

“We will be going into a cave for months to finish. An actual cave,” the two women said. “We found one that’s nice and big. We’re putting a couch in there.”

Bridesmaids brought in a whopping $288.4 million at the box office in the spring of 2011, a feat even greater for the fact that it cost only $32.5 million to make. Critics praised the film and predicted that its success would pave the way for a crop of female-created comedies starring women. But studios have been slow to catch on: of the top-grossing movies in 2013, women made up only 16 percent of the writers, directors, producers, editors and cinematographers. And only four of the 129 pictures scheduled for wide release in 2014 were made by women filmmakers.

Research suggests that studios are losing out by not investing in female-driven films: a 2013 study found that films that passed the Bechdel Test—a simple test that asks whether two women in a film talk to one another about something other than a man—did better at the box office. And strong turnout for movies with female protagonists like The Hunger Games, Gravity and—more recently—Maleficent and The Fault in Our Stars have added more evidence to the power, across multiple genres, of women at the helm.

In other words, the industry should be excited that Wiig and Mumulo are lending their comedic chops to a new project, not just because it’ll leave audiences in stitches, but because it’ll bring in the big bucks.

[NYT]