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Filmed 22–26 May 2021 · premiered in Fort Wayne 12 November 2021 · released 14 June 2022
The city as itself: For most of its screen history Fort Wayne has played somewhere else — a generic posting in In the Company of Men, Chicago in American Reel. Matt Berman's The Wedding Pact 2: The Baby Pact is the exception: a Los Angeles production that came here deliberately and played the city as itself. Berman, who wrote and directed the 2014 original, was connected through a mutual friend to Michael Gouloff of Elevatus Architecture, a Fort Wayne native; the sequel's story — Elizabeth, a pregnant widow played by Haylie Duff, comes home to Fort Wayne and is sued for custody of her unborn child — needed a courthouse, and when Berman walked into the Allen County Courthouse he chose the city on the spot. "I had NO IDEA that Fort Wayne was this perfect for the movie," as the production's local account put it.
Filming in Fort Wayne ran five days, May 22–26, 2021, centered on the courthouse, with Connor Trinneer, Quinton Aaron, Gail O'Grady, Heather McComb, Scott Michael Campbell and Richard Riehle in the cast. The film held its premiere where it was shot — a private red-carpet screening at the Sweetwater Performance Theatre on 12 November 2021 — and Freestyle Digital Media released it on 14 June 2022, with a DVD following in September. It is a modest picture, but in this record it holds a distinction nothing else does: it is the one outside production that came to Fort Wayne to be Fort Wayne.
Sources:
- Input Fort Wayne, "What was it like filming a Hollywood rom-com in Fort Wayne? We ask LA producer of The Wedding Pact 2," 10 November 2021 — the Gouloff connection, the courthouse choice, the May 2021 filming, the 12 November premiere at the Sweetwater Performance Theatre.
- Freestyle Digital Media release announcement, EIN Presswire, 16 May 2022 — release date 14 June 2022; cast; Fantasy Forge Films production; written and directed by Matt Berman.
- The film's production record as summarized by AllMovie and Wikipedia — Fort Wayne filming 22–26 May 2021; Fort Wayne premiere November 2021; United States release 14 June 2022.