Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Universal/Everett Collection, Scott Kowalchyk/CBS
“Women need to be heard,” Meryl Streep told Stephen Colbert. She was talking about the SAVE Act, but she might as well have been talking about the concept of Mamma Mia! 3, which is not a real movie so much as it is a fake movie that keeps being brought up and deserves to be a real movie. As Colbert mentions in his conversation, Amanda Seyfried has said she’d come back for more Mamma Mia!. Christine Baranski and Stellan Skarsgård have both said they’ll come back. When Colbert asks Streep if she’d come back for the movie, she gives him an enthusiastic “Damn yes!” Okay, well, can someone get cracking on this? This needs to be a reality, and not a late-night-show conversation point. Where are the adults in the room?
Streep’s willingness to come back opens up a lot of questions about what a Mamma Mia! threequel would look like, since her character, Donna, was (spoilers for an almost decade-old movie, sorry) killed off for the sequel, which was also a prequel, though Donna did briefly show up as a heavenly presence at the end. Would a third Mamma Mia! movie be set sometime between the original Mamma Mia! and Here We Go Again? Maybe there’s a world in which a third Mamma Mia! — consider this: Mamma 3-a! — lives in a transitional plane that sees all the characters meeting in purgatory, sort of like how at the end of Lost they all hung out in that church until it was time to die together as a group. Ideological issues about what this film would be and who is and isn’t alive are easy fixes for a committed filmmaker. This just needs to actually happen. If a Devil Wears Prada sequel can happen two decades later, then Mamma Mia! can operate like the Before trilogy, popping back up with an old and new set of ABBA songs every decade to check in on our friends in Greece.
We can’t keep going in circles where people say they’re down to return and then nothing happens. There needs to be action. There needs to be dedication. As Streep once said, “Women need to be heard,” and I’m women. Who do we have to call to make this happen, Rita Wilson? Streep is down, which means the money will follow. Someone get this ship out to sea.
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