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Mila Kunis has one movie on her résumé she’d love to erase — and she’s actually begged fans to stop asking for more of it.
Long before she was trading barbs with Kutcher on the awards-show circuit or headlining Bad Moms, Kunis took the lead in a direct-to-video sequel that had nothing to do with what she originally signed up for. That film, 2002’s American Psycho II: All American Girl, has followed her around for nearly two decades, and she’s made it clear she wants no part of a follow-up.
- Kunis originally signed on for a separate, unrelated project titled The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die, which the studio re-edited after filming to tie into Mary Harron’s 2000 cult hit American Psycho.
- The finished film landed an 11% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite an estimated $10 million budget, more than the original’s $8 million.
- Novelist Bret Easton Ellis, who’d sold off the film rights, warned the studio risked turning his story into “something like The Pink Panther movies.”
A Sequel She Never Agreed To Make
The bait-and-switch is the part of this story that still stings for Kunis. She signed on for The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die, a stand-alone project with no connection to Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman. During post-production, the studio went back and re-cut the footage and script to graft her character, Rachael Newman, onto the American Psycho universe — reworking her into a Bateman survivor turned criminology student who murders her way toward a coveted professorship.
By the time it hit shelves, the film had been rebranded entirely, and Kunis says she didn’t find out until after the cameras stopped rolling. Director Morgan J. Freeman helmed the finished product, with William Shatner rounding out the cast as her academic mentor.
Critics Tore It Apart
Reviewers didn’t go easy on the finished product. The Independent, weighing in on whether it deserved the title of worst sequel ever made, didn’t hold back on the direction: “However clever the director thought he was being, his savvy was not reflected in the film’s style.” Beyond the visual cheapness, several critics argued Kunis herself had simply been miscast in a role that demanded something the original franchise never asked of Bale.
Rotten Tomatoes user reviews echoed the professional pans. One reader called the film “neither frightening nor funny; in fact, it’s extremely boring,” while another labeled it “one of the oddest and most inexplicable sequels in movie history.”
The Author Who Had No Say
Ellis, who wrote the 1991 novel the original film was based on, made clear he had zero creative input once he sold the rights. He told the New York Post the studio’s franchise ambitions worried him, revealing plans that reportedly floated titles like “American Psycho in L.A.” and “American Psycho in Las Vegas.” His verdict on where that could lead was blunt — and it’s the line that sums up the whole misadventure.
“If they’re not careful they could end up with something like The Pink Panther movies.”
Kunis’s On-the-Record Plea
When talk of a third installment surfaced, Kunis used an MTV interview to shut it down as directly as she could. “Please — somebody stop this! Write a petition,” she said, before explaining the mix-up that landed her in the sequel in the first place: “When I did the second one, I didn’t know it would be American Psycho II. It was supposed to be a different project, and it was re-edited, but, ooh… I don’t know. Bad.”
It’s the kind of call-to-arms that’s echoed elsewhere in entertainment when fans and even the stars themselves push back on a project — see the campaign around the Criminal Minds character fans tried to petition off the show for another example of an audience revolt actually getting heard. Studios chasing franchise money without checking in with their own cast or the source author is exactly the kind of misstep Ellis was warning about, and it’s the same tension that’s flared up around other sequel-naming fumbles, like the confusion over Venom 2’s official title years later.
No third American Psycho movie ever materialized, so on that front at least, Kunis got her wish. She moved on to That ’70s Show‘s final seasons, then built a career that included a Golden Globe nomination for Black Swan — proof that one bad direct-to-video credit from 2002 didn’t end up defining her the way the studio’s franchise plans once threatened to.
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