It goes without saying that one of the most beloved comedy films of the 2000s was Step Brothers. Critics gave it a big, fat meh at the time, but it slammed its way into the culture’s collective comedy subconscious pretty quickly, and people are still quoting the shit out of Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly in that movie.
If you want a good read, I highly recommend the Slate article which prosecutes a hot take which I dismissed at the time but am slowly growing to accept: Step Brothers is a really great comedy.
Discussions of a sequel have floated around for a while, with both director Adam McKay and Will Ferrell alternately dismissing the concept while also floating the possibility. Back in 2014, McKay said it was possible, but not on his radar for the near future:
We have a whole story [for Step Brothers 2], an outline that we’re happy with. We were ready to go, and you know the story of [how] we got the call on Anchorman 2. We’re not gonna do it now ’cause we just did a sequel, I don’t wanna get into the sequel business too much. It was kind of a novelty to do one of them and it was certainly very interesting and I had never done anything like it. So I want to go make some original movies—or you know, The Big Short is an adaptation but do some different stuff. But who knows? 2–3 years, 3–4 years. I mean the funny thing with Step Brothers is if those guys are in their 50s it still works, so we could easily return to that, but for now no sequels.
In an interview with the New York Daily News late last week, Will Ferrell confirmed that there was an outline for a possible Step Brothers sequel, while also strenuously making clear that there’s nothing actually planned at this point.
He also divulged a little of what was planned for the plot, and… it sounds pretty funny, actually. Keeping in mind that sequels are usually pretty shit.
“We talked about ‘Step Brothers,’ and then Adam and I got sidetracked with other things,” Ferrell told the Daily News. “We had a whole story where John and I follow our parents to live in a retirement community and try to convince them that we earned the right to retire as well.”
Good content. Ferrell said one of the reasons they’re reticent to proceed with a second movie is that the Anchorman sequel didn’t exactly blow everyones’ lids off.
“The entertainment media and fans beg you, and beg you, and beg you for sequels, and then you make it and you definitely have a fraction that’s like, ‘Well, not as good as the first one,’” he said.
