Jennifer Grey will be reprising her role as Frances “Baby” Houseman in the upcoming Dirty Dancing sequel. She will also serve as an executive producer. In a statement, she said: “The role of Baby has held a very deep and meaningful place in my heart, as it has in the hearts of so many fans over the years. I’ve long wondered where we might find Baby years later and what her life might be like, but it’s taken time to assemble the kind of people that I felt could be entrusted to build on the legacy of the original film. I’m excited to say that it looks like the wait will soon be over!”
Kim Rosenstock (Dying for Sex, Only Murders in the Building, GLOW) is writing the script. Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson are producing the movie. Their production company Color Force has produced films such as Crazy Rich Asians and The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping. Jonathan Levine had previously been announced as the director, but he will now serve as an executive producer. A new director has not been announced yet. The original 1987 Dirty Dancing made $214 million and won an Oscar for best original song. The film’s soundtrack was #1 for four months.
An important note: Clearasil was brought on as a sponsor but balked when they found out there was an abortion storyline. As a result, the studio asked for it to be cut from the movie. Writer Eleanor Bergstein refused, partially because it was the impetus for Baby and Johnny’s entire relationship but also because Eleanor felt it was important for people to remember what things were like before Roe v Wade. Bergstein said she realized that by the 80s (when she began writing the script), there was a generation of women who had grown up who had in a time when abortion had always been legal during their lifetimes and they had access to Planned Parenthood. She hoped that young people watching Dirty Dancing would “learn not to take [access to abortion] for granted” and said that when she was making the film, she still feared that Roe v. Wade would be overturned one day:
“When I made the movie in 1987, about 1963, I put in the illegal abortion and everyone said, ‘Why? There was Roe v. Wade—what are you doing this for?’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know that we will always have Roe v. Wade,’ and I got a lot of pushback on that. When it came time to shoot it, I had a doctor on set to make sure [the description of the illegal abortion] was right. I used these very specific words like ‘dirty knife’ and ‘folding table,’ because I wanted a generation who just knew about Planned Parenthood and Roe v. Wade to understand how dangerous it was if you didn’t have that. I was very concerned that you saw how graphic it was, even in this movie about pretty clothes and true love. I worked very hard on shooting it to make sure it was shown realistically.”
