NEED TO KNOW
Sarah Jessica Parker is sharing an update on efforts to make a sequel to her 2005 holiday comedy The Family Stone.
“I’m so excited…. but it’s a rather bittersweet quandary given the loss of Diane Keaton,” Parker, 60, told Variety at the Golden Eve gala in Beverly Hills, Calif. on Tuesday, Jan. 6, ahead of the Golden Globe Awards on Jan. 11. (Parker received the Globes’ 2026 Carol Burnett Award in recognition of her contributions to television at the event.)
“But it was a very special group of actors, and prior to Diane’s passing, there had been conversations with everybody, so I hope that we’ll be able to,” she added of the potential Family Stone sequel. “The hardest thing is everybody’s schedules.”
The Family Stone starred Keaton, who died on Oct. 11 at age 79, as Sybil, the matriarch of a family whose holiday season is shaken up when her son Everett (Dermot Mulroney,) brings his girlfriend Meredith (Parker) to spend the Christmas season with the family. On top of that, Sybil receives a terminal breast cancer diagnosis, further inflaming tensions throughout the house over the holidays. The movie also starred Luke Wilson, Claire Danes, Rachel McAdams, Elizabeth Reaser and Craig T. Nelson among its ensemble cast.
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The movie’s writer-director Thomas Bezucha told CNN in a November interview that he had already begun working on a sequel to The Family Stone prior to Keaton’s death. (The Oscar-winning actress died after a bacterial pneumonia infection, per a death certificate.)
“I’ve been haunted by the loss of Sybil for months now while I worked on it, and so this was a blow on a tender bruise already,” Bezucha, 61, told the outlet. “Mentally, I’ve been spending time in that house where I’ve been missing her for a while already.”
Zade Rosenthal/20th Century Fox
While Bezucha told the outlet he had already entertained the idea of a sequel for some time, he would only be interested in making the movie if the rest of the original cast returns. “I’m not interested in the Brady family reunion without the original Jan,” he said at the time.
Parker recently reflected on working with Keaton on the movie in a CNN special that aired in December titled The First Christmas Without Diane. “She liked asking very personal questions,” Parker said of Keaton in that special, recalling that Keaton would ask those around her about “everything from money to, like, really funny, provocative” topics.
“I think it was simply because [Keaton] was so interested in people. She loved knowing odd facts about people and, I guess, what makes a person an individual was very interesting to her,” she added.
