When Wedding Crashers hit theaters in 2005, it was a pretty tremendous success. Not only did audiences go crazy for the comedic duo of Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn, but the film also followed Rachel McAdams’ terrific turns in Mean Girls and The Notebook and broke her out in a whole new way. Even supporting roles from folks like Isla Fisher and Bradley Cooper ended up being quote-worthy, so it’s no surprise that Warner Bros. was keen to get the gang back together for a sequel. Except it never happened.
When speaking with Collider’s own Steve Weintraub about his new Netflix comedy film Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga starring Will Ferrell and McAdams, director David Dobkin explained why he, Wilson, and Vaughn kept turning Warner Bros. down for a Wedding Crashers 2:
“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.”
It’s true, most comedy sequels that try to recapture the magic of the first film fail. And what’s fun about watching Wilson and Vaughn crash weddings again when they ended the first film in pretty stable relationships? But a few years ago, Dobkin hit upon an idea that made a Wedding Crashers sequel potentially worth doing, although he cautions it’s not quite there yet:
“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.”
Dobkin says the idea would be to embrace the passage of time, not unlike Harrison Ford’s return in Blade Runner 2049, and use that to fuel a new story for Wilson and Vaughn’s characters. But Wedding Crashers 2 is far from a done deal, as Dobkin says they’re in no rush:
“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.”
Check out what Dobkin had to say about Wedding Crashers 2 below and look for much more from our interview with Dobkin on Collider soon. Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga premieres on Netflix on June 26th.
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