Get ready to have the time of your life all over again, as Dirty Dancing is getting a sequel.
Jennifer Grey is set to appear in the film, which was officially confirmed on Thursday night, having played Frances “Baby” Houseman in the 1987 original.
Rumours of a follow-up have swirled for a while now, with studio Lionsgate calling it “one of the worst kept secrets in Hollywood”.Sharing some details about the movie, studio boss Jon Feltheimer said: “It will be exactly the kind of romantic, nostalgic movie that the franchise’s fans have been waiting for and that have made it the biggest-selling library title in the company’s history.”
The original 1987 film saw Baby fall in love with Patrick Swayze’s hunky dancing instructor Johnny Castle at a holiday resort.
Patrick sadly died in 2009 at the age of 57, after being diagnosed with
cancer.Warm Bodies filmmaker Jonathan Levine is developing the film with his frequent collaborator Gillian Bohrer, while Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis have written the screenplay.
Jennifer Grey will also serve as an executive producer.
Further details are yet to be announced, but it will reportedly be set in the 1990s.Dirty Dancing was hugely successful upon release and grossed more than $214 million (about £163m) at the global
box office.
It also landed an Academy Award and Golden Globe for Best Original Song for Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes’ (I’ve Had) The Time of My Life, which Johnny and Baby danced to in the film.
Jennifer previously explained that she had difficulty spinning around in the film’s famous dance finale, as the stage had been painted and she kept getting her feet stuck.
She said: “I remember doing the big dance finale and they had just painted the stage and it was sticky. The paint would stick to my feet so I couldn’t turn.”
She also revealed that she had practiced the movie’s famous signature lift in a “very cold” lake even though she didn’t think it was “healthy” to be in the water.
Jennifer said: “I remember swimming in the lake was very, very, very cold. You have to be really young and hungry to get in water that cold for that long. It was not good. I remember thinking, ‘Can you die if your nipples explode?’ It just didn’t feel healthy to be in that water.”
In 2004, Lionsgate released prequel Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, starring Diego Luna and Romola Garai, but it failed to achieve the same success as the original.
A TV movie remake of the 1987 film starring Abigail Breslin, Debra Messing, Nicole Scherzinger and Sarah Hyland debuted in 2017, but was met with a negative reaction from critics. READ MORE: One Of The Most Iconic 'Dirty Dancing' Lines Was A Throwaway Dirty Dancing's ‘(I've Had) The Time Of My Life' Scene Without The
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