Uncle Jonathan’s corn-cob pipe! Adam McKay is currently doing the press for action-comedy “The Other Guys,” his fourth team-up with Will Ferrell (we’re hearing promising things from screenings, incidentally), and as might be expected, questions came up about the now aborted “Anchorman” sequel. But when McKay spoke to CHUD, he revealed that it was something totally different from what anyone was expecting.
“Anchorman 2” would have been a musical. Yes, a musical. Not only that, but McKay and the cast were also planning a try-out run of the follow-up on Broadway, for a four month run. One of the reasons that the Marx Brothers comedies were so tight and packed with perfectly-timed gags is that they had a similar testing process, so it’s entirely possible that it would have led to a sequel that could have exceeded the stone-cold classic original, and the mere thought of it has us excited enough to poop a Cornish game hen.
But, as history relates, it wasn’t to be. Paramount, in an astonishingly short-sighted move, believed that the movie’s $60 million budget wouldn’t justify a sequel to a film which grossed $85 million domestically (although, to be fair, its international take was barely 5% of that). This of course ignores the fact that the movie found a huge proportion of its audience on DVD and through TV reruns, becoming a true cult hit, and that Will Ferrell, Paul Rudd and Steve Carell also used the success of that film to become box office behemoths. McKay tried to demonstrate this to Paramount (using the example of “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me,” which quadrupled the gross of its predecessor), but apparently the studio doesn’t like making money, and would rather spend $200 million on “The Last Airbender.”
McKay doesn’t hold any hard feelings, it seems, and is still working with the studio, so fingers crossed that when the current regime of executives go back to their home on Whore Island, and are replaced with fresh blood, this might see a new lease of life. But in the meantime, we’ll just have to settle to crying ourselves to sleep with “Afternoon Delight” on repeat in the background.
In related news, McKay updated Collider on “The Boys,” the adaptation of the Garth Ennis comic book about a CIA squad hunting down superheroes that he’s been linked to. The director confirmed that he’s in talks for the project, which will be R-rated. McKay seems to believe that the source material ranks alongside Alan Moore’s “Watchmen” in the genre, which is a totally fair comparison. “Watchmen,” after all, took superheroes and created a timely, mature, literary deconstruction of the half-century old genre, elevating the form to new levels of storytelling, while “The Boys” took superheroes, and added gore, tits and the word ‘fuck.’ Still, we bet McKay’s movie will be better than Zack Snyder’s “Watchmen.”