'Bridesmaids' Sequel? Nope. 'The Heat' Sequel? Yup. At Least We'll Continue to Typecast Melissa McCarthy

Whenever I start talking about Melissa McCarthy with people, someone always brings up how great she was in Gilmore Girls, how she played a normal person and how she's so much more than the boorish, pratfall-happy force of destruction that Identity Thief and The Heat have turned her into. Of course, I love it when people mention this, since (besides the Gilmore Girls part) I completely agree with them.

Bridesmaids was a smart, original and very funny comedy. Kristen Wiig deserves a ton of praise for that movie. McCarthy's role wasn't the one-dimensional part that she's been reduced to in Identity Thief and The Heat. She was the heart of Bridesmaids, and it was her character that bucked a bunch of stereotypes to send Wiig's character on the right path. Unfortunately, pretty much everything else McCarthy has done after Bridesmaids has focused in on the absurdity of that character, while putting on the blinders and ignoring everything that made her character a real person.

When it comes to selling movie tickets, people love the one-dimensional version of McCarthy that we got in The Heat. You know what that means, right?

After watching Americans fork over close to $40 million during The Heat's opening weekend, director Paul Feig is already talking the possibility of a sequel with Yahoo! Movies.

"We've got ['The Heat' screenwriter] Katie Dippold writing away on one," director Paul Feig told Yahoo! Movies when we asked about the prospect of a sequel. "We had an idea that we thought was really fun." Not surprisingly, Feig, who also helmed "Bridesmaids," is looking forward to spending more time with Ashburn and Mullins. 

"I just love these characters so much," he said. "I want to see them fighting more crime and having more fun."

Luckily Wiig isn't ready to sell her creative soul just to cash in on some sweet sequel cash. There's been talk about returning to Bridesmaids ever since the movie grossed $288 million globally, but the former Saturday Night Live star has consistently resisted any attempt to sequelize her movie. In an interview with Harper's Bazaar, Wiig reiterated her stance on a Bridesmaids sequel.

It was two years before Bridesmaids, which she cowrote (with Annie Mumolo) and starred in, and which made almost $300 million at the box office, prompting both a belated realization that "female" comedies could make money and an instant demand for a sequel. It was a proposal that Wiig, despite being offered the world, immediately rejected. "It wasn't a hard decision," she says. "We knew during the first one, this was it. We would have made a lot of money if there was a second one, but that's not my goal in my creative life."

Bridesmaids was fantastic, but I'm cool with it being a standalone story. That said, it's kind of sad that Wiig, the only person to actually write a real movie role for McCarthy, isn't going to give McCarthy another shot to do some real acting.