Reese Witherspoon and Alexander Payne pick Flick for Election sequel that’s [sigh] going straight to streaming

For the past 25 years, people have wondered, whatever happened to Election’s Tracy Flick? Witherspoon’s portrayal of an overachiever’s overachiever helped turn Alexander Payne’s pitch-black high school comedy into one of the best movies of the ’90s. So for the upcoming sequel, Tracy Flick Can’t Win, Reese Witherspoon and Alexander Payne are returning to make a made-for-TV movie.

Based on Election author Tom Perrotta’s 2022 novel, Tracy Flick Can’t Win, Payne’s film is going straight to streaming, so viewers can watch it quietly at home without the laughter of their fellow moviegoers bothering them. Yeah, we’re still doing this. If Reese Witherspoon and Alexander Payne can’t get a theatrical release, what hope is there for the rest of us?

The book follows an adult Tracy Flick, now working as an assistant principal in a suburban New Jersey school. Once again attempting to work her way to the top of the pecking order, she struggles to become principal after her boss announces his retirement.

Tracy Flick Can’t Win will premiere on Paramount+, where it can be easily ignored and forgotten, a sad fate for cinema’s perennial perfectionist. Election is a generation-defining work that continues to serve as a standard bearer for dark comedies about existential and professional malaise, the limits of ambition, and getting stung in the eye by a bee. Instead of giving this sequel a chance to become something similar, Paramount’s dumping it onto their streaming service, where it can be buried under their “mountain of movies” along with Mark Wahlberg’s Infinite, a movie so memorable that it took this writer three web searches to learn that this movie is called Infinite and not Invincible? Infinite is a real movie starring Mark Wahlberg and directed by Antione Fuqua. This actually happened. This website reviewed it. Soon, it will be joined by Tracy Flick Can’t Win.

We can tell you one person who would never settle for streaming: Tracy Flick.

[via The Hollywood Reporter]