Luca Guadagnino sidelines Call Me By Your Name sequel as he reunites with Timothée Chalamet on new movie

Call Me By Your Name fans have been holding out hope for a sequel to the Oscar-winning film starring Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer. But in light of recent events, director Luca Guadagnino seems to have moved on.

This week, the filmmaker reunites with Chalamet to start filming a new movie, Bones and All, and he spoke with Deadline ahead of the new project.

"The truth of the matter is, my heart is still there," Guadagnino says of the Call Me By Your Name sequel, "but I'm working on this movie now, and I'm hopefully going to do Scarface soon, and I have many projects and so will focus on this side of the Atlantic and the movies I want to make."

Guadagnino seemed more hopeful in past years that a sequel could happen for the story of Elio (Chalamet), an Italian teen in the 1980s who experiences a summer of intoxicating romance with his father's research assistant, Oliver (Hammer). But things have changed for even the actors.

Chalamet will likely now star in sequels for this year's highly anticipated Dune, and he's set to portray a young Willy Wonka in an origin story film. Hammer, meanwhile, has been dropped from just about every project he was attached after a troubling rape allegation emerged. (The actor's attorney refuted the claim, calling it "outrageous.")

James Ivory, who won an Oscar for adapting André Aciman's Call Me By Your Name novel for the screen, told The Film Stage in 2018 that he "wouldn't want to be involved" in a sequel. Last year, Guadagnino mentioned in an interview with Italian publication Gay. It! that he had plans to meet with a writer that he loves "very much" about taking over the sequel, but then the pandemic happened and his travel was grounded.

Now, Guadagnino is very much focused on Bones and All, his first U.S.-set feature film shot in America.

Adapted from the novel of the same name by author Camille DeAngelis, the movie tells of the "first love between Maren, a young woman learning how to survive on the margins of society, and Lee, an intense and disenfranchised drifter, as they meet and join together for a thousand-mile odyssey which takes them through the back roads, hidden passages, and trap doors of Ronald Reagan's America," reads an official logline description. "But despite their best efforts, all roads lead back to their terrifying pasts and to a final stand which will determine whether their love can survive their otherness."

Bones and All is a Call Me By Your Name reunion, nonetheless, as it stars Chalamet and Michael Stuhlbarg, the latter having played Elio's father in that film.

The cast also features Taylor Russell (Escape Room: Tournament of Champions), Mark Rylance (Bridge of Spies Oscar winner), André Holland (The Eddy), Jessica Harper (Suspiria), David Gordon-Green (director of Halloween), and We Are Who We Are's Francesca Scorsese and Chloë Sevigny.

Guadagnino's longtime collaborator David Kajganich (A Bigger Splash, Suspiria) adapts the novel for the screen.

Thankfully, for Call Me By Your Name's adoring public, there's still Aciman's book sequel and Lil Nas X's devilish stripper-pole saga.

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