Planned Call Me By Your Name Sequel Will Be Set During The AIDS Crisis

Although the Oscar-nominated, gay-themed film, Call Me By Your Name, seems like a self-contained movie, director Luca Guadagnino has been talking about the possibility of turning it into a series of films, possibly made over several decades. Now he’s been talking about what the first of those follow-up movies may be, and where the story may go after Elio (Timothee Chalamet) and Oliver’s (Armie Hammer) romantic summer in Northern Italy in 1983.

Talking to Collider he says, “I think the next chapter it will be happening right after the fall of Berlin wall and that great shift that was the end of Russia, of the USSR, sorry. And we’ll see people leaving home and going in the world. That’s what I can say for now.”

He adds to THR, that it’s likely the AIDS crisis, “I think it’s going to be a very relevant part of the story… I think Elio will be a cinephile, and I’d like him to be in a movie theater watching Paul Vecchiali’s Once More.”

Vecchiali’s 1988 movie was the first French film to deal with AIDS.

Although it’s not known when we might see this sequel, Guadagnino has suggested it could be by 2020. “The texture we built together is very consistent. We created a place in which you believe in the world before them,” he says. “They are young but they are growing up. If I paired the age of Elio in the film with the age of Timothée, in three years’ time Timothée will be 25 as would Elio by the time the second story was set.”

There is some material to draw on for the follow-up movies, as the final 40 pages of Andre Aciman’s original novel detail what happens to Elio and Oliver in the 20 years after the main storyline. However, it’s not known if Guadagnino plans to stick to this or take it in a different direction.