The Interesting Story Behind the ANCHORMAN Sequel

Anchorman 2 was technically never supposed to happen. Director Adam McKay and Will Ferrell were pushing for a sequel to happen for years, but Paramount Pictures just kept telling them no. The fact that the movie got the green light shocked the hell out Mckay and Ferrell! They weren't expecting it, three months ago the prospect of it was dead in the water, yet here it is prepping up for production. Mckay goes into detail on how this dead project was brought to life in a recent interview with THR,

Everyone said no, it was dead, a long road to get it made. And then finally Old School hit and, boom, DreamWorks was like, “We want to make it now.” We came in, and Goodman was our day-to-day guy on it. That movie was one of the funnest movies we’ve ever made, and he had a great time and got to see our process. And then the movie came out and did really good but then got even bigger on DVD and cable. So then, when he was at Paramount, he said to me, “Would you ever do a sequel?” And at first we were like, “No, we don’t want to do sequels, we have too many ideas. Why do sequels?” And then finally, we kept hearing the question so much from fans, and we’re like, Shit, man, there’s almost something original about doing a sequel, like, can-we-do-a-sequel suddenly became an interesting challenge to us. We got our heads around on it and said, “All right, we’ll do it,” and Goodman was really excited. But then it went in the numbers machine over there. And their numbers machine purely looked at the box office. It didn’t project off of DVD sales and TV and cultural influence. It stopped at the box office.  

Obviously the main issue for Paramount with making the sequel was money. The original film was made for about $26 million dollars and brought in $90 million world wide. That's not really a blockbuster kind of movie that warrants a sequel. To make the sequel Paramount set a budget of $35 million which seemed impossible to do. McKay explains why,

They kept saying, “We’ll give you $35 million.” And we’re like, “Wait a minute, if we do it for that, we’re literally not getting paid!” And they weren’t doing back end… I said, “Look, we want to do it, we don’t need to get rich off of it, but you’ve got to give us something!”

Originally, I was saying, ‘Hey, $80 million budget because it’ll be period, and you gotta pay the stars,’ and they were, like, ‘Are you crazy?’ And then quickly I was, like: ‘All right, fine, $60 million, and we can make it work. We’ll all take pay cuts,’ and they were still, like, ‘Are you out of your mind?’

Basically the careers of the actors in the film blew up since 2004 and became big box office draws. Stars such as Ferrell, Steve Carell and Paul Rudd. There was no way $35 million would cover their salaries. So how did everything work out the way it did? Basically a project Paramount was working on fell through and they need to fill the gap with something... why not that sequel to Anchorman?

Two things happened. We tried to set this other movie up for Will and Vince [Vaughn] that ended up being, once again, a crazy low offer, no back end, at Paramount, and that didn’t happen. And then the other thing that happened was I did some work on The Dictator for Sacha [Baron Cohen], kind of helping out. And I think the combination of those two things with a movie falling through, I think they saw the numbers on the other one and were like, “Wait a minute, if we’re looking at these numbers for an original Will/Vince one, and we have this other franchise that’s guaranteed to at least get you to here, why wouldn’t we do this for just a little bit more?” I think some of the numbers suddenly started rubbing against each other. And I think the other thing was, I suddenly was working with them again as a writer and as a little bit of a producer/director. They started looking at The Dictator and having fun working with me on that, and I think all three things kind of perfect stormed into, You know what? Let’s do this.

They ended up getting a budget of $50 million that they would be able to work with. 

It was perfect. We wanted $60 million, they were saying $35 million, $50 million we can get it done for. We came up with a — we’re not going to get rich — but a fair little back end sweetener on it.

Everyone in the original film is coming back for the sequel, because they all had so much fun with the orignal. As of right now they're in negotiations working on closing the deals with all of the actors. The next step is to write the script which they will be starting next week. They have the concept and ideas, they just need to get it in script form. He even talked about the tone of the film and Christina Applegate's character,

Yeah, kind of in the Austin Powers tradition, they always flip out the lead lady. No, we haven’t written it yet, but we have an idea for her that we think is pretty cool. So tentatively right now she’s in. But obviously we kind of have to let it be what it’s gonna be, we don’t want to handcuff ourselves, but we love Applegate, so any chance to work with her is always fun. So, yeah, that’s it. The last couple weeks we’ve been sitting down and banging out the story and putting it together.

We have a basic idea. I’ll tell you we’re staying roughly period, and I would just say it’s the next stage in the development of American media and news. The fun of these characters is they confront change very poorly. [laughs] So they’ve got some more change coming their way. I can say that pretty safely.

As for any cameos in the film they definitely plan on packing them in,

I would guess there’ll be some other cameos happening in this. That’s always the trick with the sequels, is how much do you repeat from the first one. Because we all get bummed out when you go see a sequel and it’s beat for beat. And you’re like, Awww… And the spirit of the first one was such a three-chord garage band kind of spirit. The funny thing is we re-watched it for the first time in four or five years the other day. I had seen pieces of it on TV. But Will and I actually sat and watched the whole movie. When it was over with, we were like, “We’ve gotten a lot better than that!” [laughs]

I enjoyed the first Anchorman film and there's no doubt it will be a blast to see all of these characters back up on screen again doing their comedy thing. The question is will it end up being better and more funny than the original? I sure hope so, I imagine that's what they're going for.

Are you excited about Anchorman 2?