The mid-’00s were a time when R-rated comedies made a huge comeback. One could argue American Pie was the beginning in 1999, but the genre didn’t really find its stride until the middle of the decade. While Judd Apatow is largely responsible for this resurgence thanks to films like The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up and Superbad, Wedding Crashers (which Apatow had nothing to do with) was actually more successful than all of them. It even made more money domestically than Batman Begins in 2005.
15 years later, one wonders why Wedding Crashers 2 was never made to capitalize on that success. Well, according to director David Dobkin, such conversations have been going on for the better part of a decade.
“Everybody keeps hitting me up about a Wedding Crashers sequel. We don’t have a script that we’re there with yet. For many, many years every year I got offered to do the sequel, there were some very big deals on the table. And none of us wanted to do a retread of the same movie again. Anything within those first years that we talked about was the same movie, and we were like, ‘Why?’ Financially I probably shouldn’t have done that, but I did (laughs). And Vince and Owen didn’t want to do it either.”
If you’ve seen The Hangover Part II, you can understand why Dobkin, Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson would be reluctant about making Wedding Crashers 2. In fact, there’s been many recent examples of comedy sequels not working, including Horrible Bosses 2, Dumb and Dumber To and Zoolander 2.
Like the other R-rated comedies of its era, Wedding Crashers follows the formula of man-children finally learning to grow up. And at the end of the movie, Vaughn and Wilson’s characters appear to be in pretty stable relationships. But a few years ago, Dobkin had a potential idea for a sequel that never came to fruition, saying:
“10 years later, when I was asked again and I hung up the phone after saying no, I thought about it and I’m like, ‘Well I’d be curious what it’d be like for guys in their late 40s who end up being single again and have to go back out in the world. What a weird, difficult, challenging story that is.’ And as long as there’s a real story in the middle of it, to me, it can be a movie.”
An idea like this might undermine the original film knowing our two leads eventually failed yet again at love. But Dobkin still believes there are seeds of something there. However, there’s no rush for anyone involved to get it made.
“So we’ll see. We started noodling on it a while ago. We’re unclear yet. Vince has to read it and Owen has to read it. I saw something that seemed like a good start. But there’s no rush to go make that movie.”
In other words, don’t hold your breath on seeing Wedding Crashers 2 anytime soon. Dobkin’s latest film, meanwhile, Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, which stars two Wedding Crashers actors, Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams, premieres on Netflix on June 26th.
