Despite reigning as one of the biggest and highest-paid movie stars on the planet at the peak of his powers, Jim Carrey hasn’t made a lot of sequels, and it doesn’t sound as though Ace Ventura 3 is going to be added to the list.
The rubber-faced comic actor avoided second installments entirely for close to two decades after 1996’s pet detective follow-up When Nature Calls, eventually reprising his role as Lloyd Christmas in Dumb and Dumber To, while this weekend brings the release of his sophomore outing as Sonic the Hedgehog villain Dr. Robotnik.
Of course, Bruce Almighty, The Mask, and even Ace Ventura itself got further films without Carrey’s involvement, and in an interview with E! News, the 60 year-old outlined the fairly unreasonable methods by which he could be convinced to throw on the private eye’s signature garish shirts and hairdo one more time.
“I think after the fact when there’s been a lot of years, unless some genius person, director, auteur comes to you with a completely new take on what’s going on, you know. If Chris Nolan came to me and said ‘I want to make Ace Ventura real and I want to do something, you know, something more interesting…’ then I might listen. But for the most part, you know, after a certain time there’s not one cell in your body that is that person anymore so you end up just imitating what you did in the old days and the original inspiration isn’t there.”
As much as we’d love to see Nolan’s grounded, cerebral take on Ace Ventura 3 with a $200 million budget and blaring Hans Zimmer score, we’d feel pretty confident in saying that it’s not going to happen. Then again, the Dark Knight trilogy director is a noted fan of MacGruber and The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, while stranger things have definitely happened.
