In a recent podcast interview, actor Kimberley Sustad announced that a sequel to the popular 2014 Hallmark Christmas romance film, The Nine Lives of Christmas, is currently in development. The original movie was based on the 2011 novel of the same name by Sheila Roberts, which was a standalone work.
Sustad, who co-starred in the film with Superman Returns’ Brandon Routh, made the announcement during an interview on the Hallmark Channels’ Bubbly Sesh podcast on Monday, although she provided no additional details.
In the book, firefighter Zach Stone and pet-store employee Merilee White bond over their love of cats after running into each other in the supermarket around Christmastime. (He’s just taken in a stray, and she’s hiding hers from her landlady, who doesn’t allow pets.) The trouble is that Zach already has a cat-hating girlfriend, as well as commitment issues, and she’s awkward and self-conscious—but things manage to work out in the end. The film, as noted in Kirkus’ Screener column last December, improves on the book by giving the couple more time together, making Merilee a more active character, and giving Zach a more supportive group of male friends; it also eschews the book’s cutesy device of telling parts of the story from a cat’s perspective.
Sustad has appeared in multiple Hallmark films in recent years, including last year’s Sense, Sensibility and Snowmen, which was co-written by novelist Melissa de la Cruz. Routh played Ray Palmer/The Atom on the CW superhero series DC’s Legends of Tomorrow for five seasons before leaving the show this year; Sustad, in the podcast interview, noted that he often gets fan questions about “the cat movie” at comic-book conventions.
Roberts’ most recent novel, Beachside Beginnings, was published in April.
David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.
