By all accounts, Phil Lord and Chris Miller succeeded in delivering a worthy sequel to their comedy smash hit 21 Jump Street with this month’s 22 Jump Street. At almost two hours long, the movie is packed with raunchy humor and over-the-top action sequences, but it remarkably never drags on. As it turns out, Lord and Miller are well-aware that their movie is essentially a feature-length compilation of ridiculous jokes, and as an experiment, cut all of humor out for what ended up being a 10-minute “conceptual piece.”
Though (luckily) moviegoers will be seeing the funny cut of 22 Jump Street when they head out to theaters this weekend, those who pick up the film when it arrives on Blu-Ray later this year will have the option of both seeing 45 minutes of deleted scenes and that 10-minute serious cut. In an interview with Collider, the directors said:
Miller: The Blu-ray is going to have like 45 minutes of scenes that we thought were funny, but couldn’t fit into the structure.
Lord: And there was some stuff that was story things that didn’t have a lot to do with Channing and Jonah. What we learned in testing was anytime those guys were apart, all anyone wanted to see was them back together. That dominated the movie. There are some really beautiful scenes with other characters that are going to be on the DVD and Blu.
Miller: This is literally 45 minutes of footage.
Lord: Plus we did an extra thing. As an experiment, we said “what if we took out anything that was supposed to be a joke, and see how much movie is left.” And have it be just story.
Miller: It was 10 minutes long. It’s a weird conceptual piece.
I’ll definitely be looking forward to seeing the Blu-Ray for 22 Jump Street so I can check out both that extra and the 45 minutes of sure-to-be-hilarious bromance between Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill that didn’t quite make the final cut. Will you?
