‘They Follow’ Gets New Title 'It Follows Saga: They Follow: Jay & Paul: An It Follows Sequel from the World of It Follows'
You follow?
From a bush somewhere in Michigan, I can now confirm that the long-awaited sequel to It Follows, They Follow is getting a new name as it heads into production. Writer and director, David Robert Mitchell discussed the name change, shouting to us from the second-story window of his Michigan home.
“Yeah, so, Neon thought we needed a new name, so audiences knew the film was a sequel,” Mitchell said, his voice echoing through his eerie suburban street. “So now we’re calling it, It Follows Saga: They Follow: Jay & Paul: An It Follows Sequel from the World of It Follows, or IFSTFJaPAIFSftWoIF for short.”
Rubbing his eyes and just wanting to go back to sleep, Mitchell went into further detail about his new film, hoping it would be enough to get us to leave him alone.
“The studio also wants us to do some auxiliary verticals for the sequel,” Mitchell said, making a face of disgust as the words, ‘auxiliary vertical’ left his lips. “Yeah, T-Mobile is paying for it or something. So, we’re doing a dumb lore dump about the shell phone from the first movie. It’ll star that one annoying friend who dryly delivered the first film's themes through an essay she found on her shell phone. Marketing is also doing a Smile thing, but instead of people smiling in public spaces, we’ve hired actors desperate for work to follow people around slowly. So yep. We’re doing all that.”
Leaving Mitchell to toss and turn about the future of film and making verticals, we turned our attention to Neon to ask about the future of the It Follows franchise.
“With this sequel, we think this franchise can gain a bigger following,” said Tom Wank, a PR person for Neon, who was a little too proud of that joke. “That’s why we need it to be clear that this is a sequel and not a new movie or something. Audiences aren’t the smartest, so you really have to beat them over the head with your messaging. Do you follow?”
At press time I’m pretty sure a starving artist followed me for three blocks while I was on my morning coffee run. The bush I hid in for this scoop was a Stalking Laurel.
