Is ‘A Simple Favor’ Based on a True Story?

A Simple Favor 2, aka Another Simple Favor, is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video, and it’s even wilder than the first movie.

Directed by Paul Feig, with a script written by Jessica Sharzer and Laeta Kalogridis, Another Simple Favor is a sequel to the 2018 dark comedy thriller, A Simple Favor. Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick are back, as fellow moms and former best friends—until the sweet-tempered mommy vlogger Stephanie Smothers (Kendrick) uncovered the dark, murderous truth about the glamorous Emily Nelson (Lively). Now, Emily shows up back in Stephanie’s life. For revenge? Well, it’s complicated.

If you’re watching the first Simple Favor movie on Netflix to prep for the sequel, you might find yourself wondering: Is A Simple Favor based on a true story? Or maybe you’re watching the sequel and wondering, is Another Simple Favor based on a true story? Decider is here to help.

Is A Simple Favor based on a true story?

No. The 2018 movie A Simple Favor is not, in any way, shape, or form, based on a true story. It is, however, based on the 2017 book A Simple Favor by Darcy Bell, which tells the story of a single mother, Stephanie, whose best friend, Emily, asks her to pick up her son from school, and then mysteriously vanishes. But that book is a fictional novel, which means it is made up. It’s not real.

Is Another Simple Favor based on a true story?

No, the 2025 sequel to A Simple Favor, Another Simple Favor, is not based on a true story. And unlike the first film, Another Simple Favor is not based on a book. It’s an original script written by Jessica Sharzer and Laeta Kalogridis.

In a recent interview with Decider, director Paul Feig revealed that early drafts of the sequel centered on Emily and Stephanie on the run. “We had an early version that was about the two of them on the run, trying to hide, which meant they were going to be in disguise,” Feig said. “My producer partner, Laura [Fischer] looked at each other like, ‘We want fashion.’ I don’t want to see Blake having to tone down her look! We re-jiggered the whole script to accommodate that.”

Feig told Sharzer, who also wrote the script for the first movie, that he wanted to film the movie in Capri, Italy, where the director has been vacationing for over 30 years. So Sharzer came up with the idea of Emily staging a lavish wedding to a powerful Italian mob boss (played by Michele Morrone).

That said, though Another Simple Favor is not at all based on a true story, there was a real Capri wedding that inspired Feig: The real-life Capri wedding of Vogue fashion editor Giovanna Battaglia.

“They took over Capri for three days and had the most audacious, expensive wedding you’ve ever seen in your life. I saw those pictures and I said, ‘I want to recreate that wedding,’” Feig said in an interview for the film’s production notes.

In a separate interview with IndieWire, Feig revealed that Emily’s wedding ceremony in the movie was filmed in the exact same location as the real Giovanna Battaglia’s wedding. “Where Blake gets married in our movie, that’s where Giovanna got married. We hired the same people to build that deck out.”

But that’s as close as Another Simple Favor gets to being “based on a true story.” It’s not real. It’s a movie.