‘Jump Street’ directors share new details on abandoned ‘Men in Black’ crossover

Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s Jump Street movies are rightly lauded as two of the finest studio comedies of the last decade, with each installment going down a storm with critics and fans alike.

As well as combining to earn over half a billion dollars at the box office, they each hold identical Rotten Tomatoes scores of 84%, but it’s beginning to look highly unlikely that we’ll ever be seeing Jonah Hill’s Morton Schmidt and Channing Tatum’s Greg Jenko back on our screens, with eight years having passed since the sequel.

Spinoff Jump Street: Now for Her Pleasure remains in development for the time being, but one missed opportunity supporters of the series will always rue is the abandoned crossover with the Men in Black franchise.

Tentatively titled MiB23, the project was initially revealed to be in the works by the infamous Sony hacks, before falling through the cracks and being consigned to the scrapheap altogether. Speaking on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Lord and Miller offered up some tantalizing details as to what they had in store.

“It’s true that there have been a lot of these things developed. There was, believe it or not, a Men In Black/Jump Street crossover script that was very funny and very crazy that we really adored. One of my favorite ideas was the Men In Black, the Black Suits were like martial arts belts that you had to work your way up to black and [the Jump Street guys] were issued powered blue Men In Black suits.

Basically, the idea was Jonah and Channing, a thing happened while they were doing their medical school adventure that got them embroiled into the world of Men In Black and that got them teaming up to stop an alien takeover type of thing. It was very funny, it was crazy trying to manage these two franchises and not drive them both into the ground seemed like a real challenge. I will say it came very close to happening.”

Combining the acclaimed irreverence of Jump Street with a blockbuster sci-fi property sounded so insane there was a high chance it would have been awesome, and it stings even more knowing that we ended up with the dismal Men in Black: International instead.