Bend It Like Beckham 2 is finally happening, another in a long list of early-2000s classics—including The Devil Wears Prada, Practical Magic, and Freaky Friday—to get the sequel treatment. Clearly, millennial nostalgia is still going strong.
Gurinder Chadha, the director of the 2002 classic starring Keira Knightley and Parminder Nagra, broke the news to Deadline on July 26. “I’m excited to revisit the original characters and revive the enduring story and build on the legacy we helped to create for the women’s game,” she said.
A true Y2K British classic, Bend It Like Beckham was the film that brought women’s soccer into the spotlight and also gave us such classic lines like, “Lesbian? Her birthday’s in March. I thought she was a Pisces,” and “Anyone can cook aloo gobi, but who can bend a ball like Beckham?”
While the whole Y2K sequel thing can be a little controversial, Bend It Like Beckham is one teen classic that absolutely deserves a 2025 update. After all, a lot has changed in the world of professional women’s soccer in the past two decades.
In Chadha’s 2002 film, Parminder Nagra stars as Jess, a young British Indian girl with dreams of being a soccer star. She meets Jules (Keira Knightley), a member of amateur women’s team Hounslow Harriers, but that team is pretty much the limit of their soccer careers in the UK at the time. As a giddy Jules tells Jess in one scene, in America, women can actually get paid to play. The idea! After some difficult conversations with her family, the film ends with Jess leaving the UK behind to study in America along with Jules, where they will hopefully forge professional careers in the sport.
This week alone is a reminder that a lot has changed when it comes to women’s soccer. The British women’s team has just won the Euros. As the sport is becoming more and more popular, there’s still a long way to go to make it more equal. A sequel to Bend It Like Beckham will be an amazing opportunity to reflect on how far it’s come—and how far we still need to go.
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What will Bend It Like Beckham 2 be about?
We don’t know too much about the plot of the potential sequel yet—but we can hazard a few guesses. The first film ended with Jess and Jules leaving for America. They left their former coach, Joe, behind in the UK.
