The studio was so impressed by Chu’s vision it decided to scrap its original direct-to-video plan for “Step Up 2,” quadruple its budget and release it theatrically. The shift in emphasis proved to be a turning point for the series. “He really put front and foremost their talent, as opposed to the drama of their story.” “Jon always saw these kids as like superheroes,” Shankman said. The goal, he added, was to make “sort of a dancical” - a musical with dance instead of song. “The first one had maybe four or five dance numbers.
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“My whole thing was that if I’m going to do a dance movie sequel, I want more dancing,” Chu explained in a recent phone interview. Chu, who went on to make last year’s enormously successful “Crazy Rich Asians.”Ĭhu delights in the physicality of his young performers, and rather than pretend to care about the story, he relishes every opportunity to linger on bodies in motion - often at the expense of conventional niceties like character development and plot.
That’s thanks in part to its director, Jon M.
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“Step Up 2” is considerably more entertaining than its predecessor, full of ecstatic brio and Busby Berkeley-ish panache. “We went, ‘Sure, why not?’” said Shankman. Summit Entertainment, the studio behind “Step Up,” approached Shankman and his co-producers about doing the same.
It earned that back nearly 10 times over.Īround this time, Universal Studios had begun churning out a number of direct-to-video sequels to “Bring It On,” the popular high school cheerleader comedy. When the movie was released in August 2006, Shankman and Fletcher were in Toronto, working on the remake of “Hairspray.” Shankman remembers going to a theater on opening night and being surprised to find “a line around the block to get in.” The movie cost $12 million to make. Because Shankman and Fletcher had both worked in dance, they were keen, Shankman said, “to have people who could really dance.” They cast the up-and-coming actor and dancer Channing Tatum as the lead.
The franchise’s endurance more than a decade later is even more surprising than the original film’s splash: Such continual triumphs are typically reserved for big, special effects-heavy fantasy epics like “Harry Potter” or “Star Wars,” not modest, cheerful underdog stories about competitive street dancing, in which the only action consists of pops, locks and twirls.įor “Step Up,” Shankman hired Anne Fletcher, a choreographer he describes as his best friend, to direct the film the script was penned by Duane Adler (“Save the Last Dance”) and Melissa Rosenberg (the “Twilight” movies). As of early May, it had 17.8 million views. Season 2 of that series, “Step Up: High Water,” had its premiere on YouTube Premium in March, and the first episode was watched more than 10 million times in its first week, according to the streaming service.
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Yet it proved extraordinarily successful, earning over $100 million worldwide and spawning four lucrative sequels and, most recently, a hit TV series. The movie - a low-budget drama about a young ne’er-do-well who strives to prove his worth in a ballet recital at a prestigious inner-city arts school - was an unlikely candidate for blockbuster status, even on the heels of Fox’s “So You Think You Can Dance,” which debuted the year before. In 2006, “Step Up” arrived at the tail end of something like a dance craze in American cinema, an era of sprightly, sweat-streaked films such as “Save the Last Dance,” “You Got Served,” and “Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights.”
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