Jennifer's Body was released in 2009 to largely mixed reviews and a $31.5 million global box office haul on a $16 million budget. However, rather than being forgotten, it's earned cult status for its unique blend of horror, comedy, and social commentary.
Directed by Karyn Kusama and written by Diablo Cody, the movie stars Megan Fox as Jennifer Check, a high school cheerleader who is possessed by a demonic force after a ritual gone wrong. Amanda Seyfried plays Jennifer's best friend, Needy Lesnicky.
From there, we followed Jennifer as she developed a taste for human flesh and began preying on male classmates. Needy, realising what's happened to her friend, later tries to stop Jennifer's murderous rampage.
Talking to Bloody Disgusting, Cody admitted he'd like to make a follow-up, enthusiastically telling the site, "Yes! I wanna do a sequel."
"I am not done with Jennifer’s Body," he added. "I just need to find...I need to partner with people who believe it in as much as I do and that hasn’t really happened yet. I need someone to believe in it who has a billion dollars."
It's clearly far from greenlit at this stage, but Cody would go on to share his gratitude for the way horror fans have since embraced the movie's LGBTQ+ themes and feminist messages. "I mean, it’s gotten progressively happier for me," he says. "At first I was like, I was excited about it obviously, but I was also a little bit salty because I remember thinking, well where was this audience when the movie came out. It was a critical, commercial failure."
"I was pretty humiliated to be perfectly honest with you. It was a rough experience having that movie come out," Cody said of the initial reaction. "It was rough for me, it was rough for Megan [Fox]...[then] people started suddenly talking about it like it was a good movie, which I had thought all along. At first I just thought, oh where was this audience when I needed it, and then I realized they were like...seven."
"And then some people who maybe didn’t appreciate it at the time have come around and now I’m just like, there’s no saltiness, now I’m just happy."
Fox's big debut came in 2007's Transformers and, two years later, she'd mostly become known for that sultry performance. In Jennifer's Body, she delivered some of the best work of her career, but as the movie was largely promoted towards men with a focus on Fox's looks, it struggled to find its intended audience in theaters.
Would you like to see a Jennifer's Body sequel become a reality?