According to The Hollywood Reporter, Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino has already sketched out the beginning of a sequel to his wildly popular film, and it sounds like a lot of it will involve the AIDS epidemic in the mid-’80s. He says he envisions Call Me Your Name as the first entry in a long series like Before Sunrise, and he’d like this hypothetical sequel to open with Timothée Chalamet’s Elio seeing the 1988 French film Once More in a theater.
As THR explains, Once More was the first French film to “deal with AIDS,” and it sounds like Guadagnino is planning to make that movie an impactful experience in Elio’s life. “If the first one is a story of coming of age and becoming a young man,” he explains, “maybe the next chapter will be, what is the position of the young man in the world, what does he want.” Guadagnino also notes that André Aciman’s original novel (which the movie is based on) ends with a few dozen pages that go through the next 20 years of Elio and Oliver’s lives, so “there is some indication…that the story can continue.”
There’s no word on when this sequel might happen, but however the Oscars go in March might be a big factor.