Claire Danes, Sarah Jessica Parker and Rachel McAdams are to return for The Family Stone sequel.
Many of the original cast members from the 2005 holiday classic will be reprising their roles for the upcoming The Families Stone, including Dermot Mulroney as Everett Stone, Craig T. Nelson as Kelly Stone, Luke Wilson as Ben Stone, Tyrone Giordano as Thad Stone, Elizabeth Reaser as Susannah Stone, Paul Schneider as Brad Stevenson and Brian White as Patrick Thomas.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the official logline for The Families Stone reads: “Twenty years after their mother’s passing, the Stone family reunites for Christmas only to face the season’s biggest surprise: their father has unexpectedly invited the woman he’s fallen in love with to meet the family.”
The original movie followed eldest son Everett as he brought girlfriend Meredith (Parker) home to meet his family for Christmas, when he planned to propose. But after Meredith received a hostile reception, she asked her sister Julie (Danes) to join her for support, sparking further complications.
Director Thomas Bezucha first revealed he was working on a sequel a month after Stone family matriarch Diane Keaton - whose character, Sybil Stone, died from a terminal illness at the end of the first movie - passed away in October 2025 at the age of 79.
He told CNN: "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. Mentally, I’ve been spending time in that house where I’ve been missing her for a while already.”
As well as wanting to "honour her even more" with the sequel, Bezucha is even more motivated to "do a good job by the rest of the cast".
Although Parker is "excited" for a sequel to The Family Stone, she called it a "bittersweet quandary" because of Keaton's death.
In January, she told Variety: "I’m so excited … but it’s a rather bittersweet quandary given the loss of Diane Keaton.
"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.
"The hardest thing is everybody’s schedules."
And Wilson thinks the sequel will be "even more meaningful" following the death of Keaton.
He said: “Tom Bezucha is a great writer and a great director, and I read the script, and it’s really funny, and it’s so nice that everybody wants to work together again.
“After the death of Diane Keaton, it’ll be even more meaningful because she was so great to be around on the first one.”
