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 and with a script by Jessica Sharzer and Laeta Kalogridis, Another Simple Favor is the follow-up to the 2018 dark comedy thriller, A Simple Favor. Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick reprise their roles as fellow moms and former best friends—until the amiable mommy vlogger Stephanie Smothers (Kendrick) exposes the sinister and deadly side of the chic Emily Nelson (Lively). Suddenly, Emily reenters Stephanie’s life. Is she seeking revenge? It turns out to be more complicated than that.

If you’re rewatching the original A Simple Favor on Netflix to gear up for the sequel, you might ask: Is A Simple Favor based on a true story? Or perhaps after seeing the sequel, you’re curious whether Another Simple Favor is drawn from real events. Decider is here to clarify.

Is A Simple Favor based on a true story?

No, the 2018 film A Simple Favor is not based on a true story. It is, however, an adaptation of the 2017 novel A Simple Favor by Darcy Bell. The story revolves around a single mother, Stephanie, whose best friend, Emily, asks her to pick up her son from school, only to mysteriously disappear afterward. But remember, that book is a work of fiction, so it’s entirely made up. It isn’t 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.