Will Ferrell says the Elf sequel was so bad he had to turn down a $29 million offer
Without Will Ferrell onboard, Elf 2: Buddy Saves Christmas was shelved
Aux News Will Ferrell
When Elf came out in 2003, it was a massive hit. It became Will Ferrell’s biggest starring role (his role in Zoolander was a supporting one), coming just a year before Anchorman. After the movie did incredibly well at the box office, grossing $220 million, plans for a sequel were discussed. But in a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Ferrell explains why he decided to turn it down.
The sequel was poorly written reportedly, and though Ferrell was offered $29 million to play Buddy again—but he couldn’t, in good conscience, stand by something he wasn’t proud of just because he’d be making big bucks from it.
“I would have had to promote the movie from an honest place, which would’ve been, like, ‘Oh no, it’s not good. I couldn’t just turn down that much money,’” Ferrels says. “And I thought, ‘Can I actually say those words? I don’t think I can, so I guess I can’t do the movie.”
Ferrell didn’t share what the premise of the sequel was, or if it was also written by Elf screenwriter David Berenbaum. Mental Floss reported in 2013 that the sequel was supposed to be called Elf 2: Buddy Saves Christmas, so it sounds like it’d be a rehashing of the first movie’s story.
But back in 2020, James Caan—who played Buddy the Elf’s dad, Walter—told Cleveland’s 92.3 The Fan’s Bull & Fox show that there was a different reason why Ferrell didn’t want to do the sequel.
“We were gonna do it and I thought, ‘Oh my god, I finally got a franchise movie, I could make some money, let my kids do what the hell they want to do.’ And the director [Jon Favreau] and Will didn’t get along very well,” he said. “So, Will wanted to do it, he didn’t want the director, and he had it in his contract, it was one of those things.”
179 Comments
I’m kind of terrified of how bad this script was, considering he said yes to Bewitched. And Curious George. And Land of the Lost. And Daddy’s Home. And Zoolander 2. And The House. And Daddy’s Home 2. And Downhill.
You forgot Blades of Glory.
And Eurovision
Nope, that movie was great.
Shut your mouth. An American comedy about EURO-FUCKING-VISION making me cry was not something I expected to type out loud.
You shut your whore mouth, Blades of Glory is a masterpiece!
Since I’m a skating fan I kept pointing out all the inaccuracies of the skating when I watched the movie.
Blades of Glory is forgettable, but not bad.
Take that back. That movie is glorious.
I said what I said! In a show of bipartisanship, I’ll say that Will Ferrell is good IN the film, but Jon Heder. Jon Heder, you guys.
I didn’t see the Sherlock and Holdmes he and John C. Reilly did, but my friend who watches everything told me he turned it off midway through.
Holmes and Watson is a zero star movie. Terrible and not funny.
I’m kind of terrified to watch Holmes and Watson…there’s this stink of wrongness surrounding it that makes me scared that it would retroactively ruin the movies with Ferrell and Reilly that I enjoy.
Holmes and Watson, which I also haven’t seen, was my first thought upon seeing the headline. They couldn’t even conjure one passable joke for the trailer.
And Holmes and Watson. When was the last time he had a major role in a movie that wasn’t terrible?
Don’t forget Holmes & Watson (10% on Rotten Tomatoes)!
H&W is hands down the worst thing Farrell has done. No matter how bad those other films are, nothing will reach the nadir that was Holmes and Watson.
I haven’t seem H&W, and I have no intention of ever doing so, but Will Ferrell getting more work for John C. Reilly is far preferable to a lazy cash-in that also employed Mel Gibson.
For my sins, I preferred Daddy’s Game over H&W.
Even though Mel Gibson is hugely problematic (to be far nicer than I need to be), that lame comedy worked.
I think Get Hard was worse than Holmes & Watson. This might not be a popular opinion, but I feel like Holmes & Watson was not uniquely terrible so much as it was the breaking point after *a lot* of mediocre or worse films with Ferrell doing his somewhat tired schtick. Thankfully, Eurovision, which I thought looked awful from much of the publicity material, turned out to be pretty good.Incidentally, Holmes & Watson was in production as far back as at least 2009, when Sacha Baron Cohen was going to play Watson. It’s one of those “just make it because the studio executives are sick of having scripts for this on their desk” films, a la Catwoman, Son of the Mask etc.
I never watched the Holmes & Watson movie, but the scene from the trailer where Watson is wildly firing a revolver into a swarm of bees made me giggle.
H&W had two or three funnyish scenes. They were all in the trailer.
Land of the Lost isn’t very good but doesn’t belong on that list.
It’s forgettable at worst.
Land of the Lost automatically gets extra points for having Anna Friel in it.
Yeah, LoL is a dumb, shitty movie, but it’s not unwatchable.
And Elf.
Wash your mouth out – it’s a great film.
I have never understood the love for Elf, unless you were a kid when you first saw it.
Elf is hilarious, an all-time comedy. I love it as much as Ghostbusters (1984), which I did first see as a kid, in theaters when it first came out.
Elf is good-hearted and earnest, which I imagine was what Favreau was going for. An anti-Shrek movie. I can imagine what sort of low-class idiocy Ferrell would have put into it.
And Anchorman 2. And the worst episode of Eastbound And Down.
The House had Jason Mantzoukas in it so it is worth a watch for him alone.
right? This horrific track record kinda lends more credence to Jimmy Caan’s explanation than Will Ferrell’s, although I’m sure they offered Ferrell an assload of money to do the sequel.
^^^^
My thought as well, he has said yes to some bad shit. I guess his reasoning was that those movies just kind of sucked on their own, while a bad sequel to Elf would sully a modern-day Christmas classic.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I really like Bewitched.
Yuck but I like Cannonball Run 2. So who am I to judge?
Such strong feelings about Curious George, which was an imperfect but otherwise enjoyable family movie. Worst part about it was David Cross’s animated ponytail.
“David Cross’s animated ponytail.”…fuck. Might have to watch that now.
tbh they nailed it I just think it’s greasy looking
As a general rule, don’t agree to do any project involving David Cross unless you’re just looking to put a new roof on the house or add a swimming pool.
David Cross’s animated ponytail
would make a good username here. Or elsewhere, sure, but here especially.
I rewatched Bewitched last year and he was the worst actor; I had no idea what kind of direction he was being given, but it was wrong at every turn.
Shit. I never knew that there was a Curious George movie. I might have to watch the trailer to see how bad it is.Edit: It was animated so that’s why I never heard of it.
and it’s fucking flawless
Land of the Lost is fucking hilarious.
As an adaptation of the TV show, it’s an abomination, but as a Will Ferrell movie, it is hysterical. Just the Hadrasaur urine scene alone cracks me up.
Hold on maybe this is one of those situations where the script was actually so good that his judgment was so bad he actually turned down a really good movie
Bewitched is an underrated movie. The House is fucking hilarious. Land of the Lost was ok and had some genuinely funny moments.Downhill is absolute garbage. Daddy’s Home is bad but had a couple of laughs but it and its sequels promoting sexual violence against girls as a way for boys to get girls to like them makes me sick.
“it and its sequels promoting sexual violence against girls as a way for boys to get girls to like them makes me sick.”Yikes. I didn’t see either of them, hadn’t heard about that angle and can’t find much online. That sounds horrible; can you provide some details? Jesus.
at the end of Daddy’s Home there’s a father daughter dance. Ferrel’s stepson has been bullied at school/ it’s a running thread. turns out the bully is a girl. At the dance the girl says something, you’re dads are losers or something, and the boy kicks her between the legs. the boy is cheered and he and the girl end up dancing.Daddy’s Home 2 has thew boy having a crush on a girl but too shy to act on it. his sister or stepsister tells him to just go up to her and kiss her. He does and she likes it.seems like sending the wrong message. assault girls and they will like you.
and anchorman 2
Land of the Lost was surprisngly good. I kept hearing hwo awful it was, watched it by accident and found it hilarious.Is something wrong with me?
Will Ferrell is a bit like Adam Sandler in my view. I acknowledge that they are actually talented because sometimes they do put in great performances (Stranger than Fiction for Ferrell, Punch-Drunk Love and Uncut Gems for Sandler) but I just can’t stand the type of broad comedies that they tend to appear in.
50 First Dates was a good Sandler movie too.
As a regular working guy in what’s become a tech-bro, alpha, super-achiever town full of dot-com exec/Stanford/used to be in a band/was a pro snowboarder/collect ‘70s BMWs/sure, I’ll coach all the sports super dads, I found Daddy’s Home to be both relatable and freakin’ hilarious.
Kicking and Screaming fom 2005 with Ferrell and Robert Duvall as rival kids soccer coaches is absolutely awful, just a rotten putrid mess.Curious George is fine as a movie aimed at four year olds, but even as a movie for nine year olds with no higher aspirations, Kicking and Screaming is just miserable.
I’ll defend Land of the Lost to the death as a weird, surreal yet oddly funny movie, in spite of Will Ferrel rather than because of Will Ferrel.
Danny McBride brings the real comedy to that movie.
I’m guessing the regret of not taking all that Elf money made an impact on his decision-making process.
You should also consider that at the early point in his career, coming off of his first starring role which was a big hit and a critical success, he probably was pickier than he became. At a certain point, he probably realized, “Well, not everything is going to be great, so fuck it, i’ll do what I can and make some dough.”But as a starry-eyed relative newcomer, I buy that he wanted to continue swinging for the fences before being jaded by experience.
I quite enjoyed Downhill. I haven’t seen the original though.
Curious George is great
Personally I’d say add the original Elf to the list too. It was successful but I never thought it was very good
That’s some good gossip from James Caan. Not that I haven’t enjoyed some of Will Ferrell’s movies, but it’s not like he hasn’t made some bad ones. They wouldn’t have been open to script changes? But I also don’t know anything about movie making.
I can totally see Jon Favereau not mixing well with Will Ferrell’s brand of goofyness. That dude is on almost 100% of the time and Favreau seems like a more no nonsense kind of guy
Really? He worked well with RDJ who seems like a “I like some nonsense and levity on my set” kinda guy
I think it’s safe to say most celebrities and people in general aren’t exactly like their PR interviews.
Will Ferrell was in an episode of “Dinner for Five” post-Elf! But Jon Favreau skipped out on the Elf zoom reading/fund raiser last year, so who knows how deep it all goes!(Hilariously, Jon Favreau’s part was portrayed by Obama speechwriter turned podcaster Jon Favreau.)
Yeah, but RDJ, at least at that point in his career, was in “holy shit, I’m not fucking up this lifeline being thrown at me” mode.
Yeah RDJ’s performance in IRON MAN is a man acting like his life depended on it, because it kind of did.
RDJ: “Wait… I get to play a guy who dove into his vices so hard that when reality came knocking, he chose to become a Superhero rather than confronting his actual problems?” Movie Exec: “Yep”RDJ: “Well, it’ll be a stretch. It will require all my tremendous acting talent to play a billionaire alcoholic womanizer that does everything on a whim without regard for how his actions will effect others, particularly his friends.”Movie Exec: “We don’t want you to go the method route for this one. Stay clean or we’re gonna get Russel Brand instead.”
RDJ: “It’s not like I’m gonna define my comeback with characters that are heavy alcoholics and drug users. *puts down script to Sherlock Holmes*”
I don’t see any commonalities between the two other than they were both on SNL (for RDJ it was a very, very, very brief stint).
Isn’t Favreau besties with Vince Vaughn? Weren’t Will Ferrell and VV in this era basically the same guys?
Ferrell definitely does NOT seem like one of those insufferable comedians who’s “on all the time.”
According to people who’ve worked with him, Ferrell’s funniest stuff is off-camera. Either you love that and love hanging out with him on set or you want him to knock it off and get back to work. If you’re a director focused on running a tight filming schedule to stay on budget, the last thing you want is your star fucking up your timeline to get a laugh from the cast and crew every ten seconds.
hey Jimmy, FYI your kid has a long-running TV show, he has probably made more money than you have…you should be asking *him* for money, not the other way around LOL
Why not just replace Ferrell with not-at-all-corny Property Brother Jonathan Scott and capture that white-hot chemistry between him and Deschanel?
builder grade will farrell
Man, before she revealed herself to be the living embodiment of “Put a Bird on It!” Elf-era Deschanel had a kind of deadpan snarky vibe. I miss Blonde!Deschanel.
Blonde, bangs-less Deschanel is best Deschanel.
Of course she still sings(saw her once at small venue)in duo with M. Ward called She & Him. They have done their own music plus Christmas ones.
Isn’t he “with” his “brother”? There’s a weird vibe there.
I tease my wife about this all the time just to annoy her—imagine if they could have children together, they would be so attractive, stupid laws of nature LOL
I don’t totally see their appeal. They’re in a kinda real world Uncanny Valley zone. The smiles seem inauthentic – I would suspect they are actually robots or aliens. But otherwise agree. They should raise kids together.
Maybe it was a mix of all of those things. Bad script + not getting along with the director. But I also could see an Elf sequel being terrible incredibly likely. In the end we’re better off with it just being a single movie.
I cannot believe Elf came out before Anchorman
It was within just a few months of each other, and not long after Old School. It’s nuts to think how hot Will Farell was for like a year.
Will Ferrell’s 2003-2004-2005 was pretty incredible, and he did Talladega Nights and Stranger than Fiction in 2006. The air was coming out of the balloon by Blades of Glory in 2007, however.
very similar to jim carrey’s 90s run in a vacuum, but the fact that ferrell’s coincided with apatow, the snl cast at the time and jack black’s run was a real nuclear moment for comedy movies.
Carrey from Ace 1 in 1993 to ‘96/’97 was an unstoppable train
Blades of Glory is brilliant, we just rewatched it last week.
so is Step Brothers, which is 2008, but then the duds started piling up
Step Brothers was like a comedy fire-sale, and I mean that in a good way.
Not as much as it was for the other guy in Blades of Glory, however!
Will Ferrell; so hot that year.
I was just thinking that. Old School, Elf and Anchorman were huge hits and they were legitimately good in my opinion. After that, i kind of got tired of Ferrell’s schtick.
It did. It was Ferrell’s first lead role in a film.
much more interested in the favreau/ferrell tea. favreau always seems to speak so fondly of the movie.
The climax to Elf just is kind of weird. Like, these mounted cops who Santa wrote on the Naughty List as kids and decide to hunt Santa down and stop Christmas based off a decades old grudge. Like, they’re even the movie for that long and none have a single line of dialogue. They just show up to hunt Santa down. I kind of wish they had more of a presence in the movie.
Yes, but ACAB, so I buy it.
I buy it too. But I feel like they should have been in the movie more. Like, they figure out Buddy’s actually knows the real Santa is and they try to arrest and interrogate him.
The last act has some issues for sure and those cops were very clumsily thrown in to add some phony jeopardy.
Maybe they would have had more of a presence in this hypothetical sequel.
Elf is a movie where almost every scene is way better than the sum of the parts.
Dare I say it’s not a particularly inspired film, it’s just better than the other family friendly Christmas films that came out during the DVD boompre-streaming era, and thus became a “Christmas classic”. There’s no easier way of having a long shelf life than setting a film at Christmas; even something as unloved as Christmas With the Kranks still gets some life every December.Yes, yes, I know, I’m being visited by three ghosts tonight.
On October 30th? Either they’re getting in early to deal with the backlog of the Ghosts of Pre-Halloweens Past, Present and Future have finally found someone to have a bone to pick with.
My wife and I enjoy watching It’s a Wonderful Life, and my kids will generally tolerate Charlie Brown and/or the Grinch, but thank fucking god nobody has that great of an attachment to Christmas movies around our house. The prospect of watching the Santa Clause or Polar Express would make me declare the whole family Jewish.
Boy, if everyone worked like that we’d’ve been denied the greatness of Jaws 4.
Elf: The Revenge
The Elfening
Elfnado
Elfdingo
Elf 2: Elf Harder
Totally Off ‘Da Shelf!
Considering how Elf is an absolute gem, a bad sequel would’ve driven its gem score into the toilet, so we dodged that bullet.
Ferrell’s explanation doesn’t hold water for me. Script rewrites happen all the time. The studio obviously wanted Will for the movie if they genuinely offered $29 million, so that means Will would have had enough pull within production to get the script rewritten if he wanted it. I think James Caan’s explanation sounds more plausible. “Creative differences” with Favreau makes more sense. I’m sure Favreau had quite a bit of pull himself after directing such a huge hit. So if Favreau and Will didn’t get along, the studio may have said to themselves, “Well we can’t get rid of Favreau for Will, and we can’t do this without Will…let’s just offer Will a ton of money and he can’t turn that down!” I’m guessing the script WAS as bad as Will stated, but Will is just using that as cover so he doesn’t have to come out and say, “That Favreau guy, who basically laid the foundation of the multi-gajillion dollar MCU franchise and has the Disney and Marvel Studios CEOs on speed dial, is a jerk. While I’m here, let me use this gun to shoot myself in the foot!” The bigger mystery here is James Caan. According to celebritynetworth.com, he’s worth about $20 million (which seems criminally low, considering his iconic roles over the years). Yet, he doesn’t think he has enough money to support his kids? I guess with 4 ex-wives, 5 kids, and a Beverly Hills zip code, $20 million is really not much.
4 ex-wives? At a certain point, there’s something to be said for quitting things you’re not good at
“Some guys like a challenge… not me.”
Well there were a lot of interested women:
https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-693909a7fe17f929a2b29b1fd535ec5a
He’s so good at getting married he did it 4 times!
Even better at getting divorced, apparently.
“I hear Johnny Carson is going to take a new wife. The previous ones took him!” — Bob Hope
I resemble that remark. 5 wives.
Well, as discussed in the thread above, Will Ferrell will insist on continuing to act in movies..
If you keep wrecking cars, stop buying them and start leasing them.
or just rent one when you feel like taking a spin and pay the $8 a day or whatever it is to have no consequences
Both things can actually be true! And, while script rewrites do indeed “happen all the time”, if you’re starting with a complete piece of crap, they almost never manage to make it into something good.
Elf II: The Polishing Of The Turd
Why would that be criminally low? How much do you think he got paid for Sonny Corleone or even Misery, when he was like the 15th choice to play that part?
To be fair, he said he wanted to let hiss kids do what the hell they want to do. Maybe what they want to do is sink brand new commercial airliners into tar pits. People are into weird stuff.
Jon Favreau and Faizon Love wanted to kick Will Ferrell’s ass apparentlyhttps://youtu.be/XS3FAksq6G8
He was talking about potentially making enough money that his kids could just be Hollywood people who go to parties and don’t have to get jobs. Which, 20 million is definitely not that much.
Yeah there was more to it.
Based only on that making-of Netflix special, I am more likely to believe that it was a personality clash been Favreau and Ferrell. It sounds like Ferrell is just a very annoying person to work with.
You got that out of the Netflix special? Neither Ferrell nor Favreau were interviewed for it. I saw it, but, as with every episode of the show, they are pretty much just hagiographies where everything was amazing all the time and conflicts were always brief and resolved amicably.
I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek about my info source but I doubt that translated, sorry. I did legitimately come away from it with the impression that James Caan thinks Will Farrell is an asshole, though.
James Caan is probably a cranky asshole himself and it’s not remotely hard to imagine that he’d fine a wacky comedian to be annoying.
Yeah wouldn’t have been the first time he did a bad film though.,
How did James Caan not have money in 2003?
Faberge egg addiction.
Someone upthread mentioned 4 ex-wives
Cute answer, but obvious bullshit. He had to know the Holmes and Watson script sucked, so why do that and not Elf?
HOT TAEK: I think Elf is a bit overrated. I feel like a lot of the appeal is that Ferrell does a manchild very well and children found that great. As an adult though, his schtick always seems to be a manchild who is hiding a lot of latent rage (Anchorman, Old School, a lot of his SNL skits) or his unrealistically naive (Ricky Bobby, Get Hard, Daddy’s Home). I never get a sense of sincerity from him which always make his characters both caricatures and a bit unsettling. He comes pretty close to that sincerity in Elf, or at least enough to convince kids.
Will Farrell “couldn’t, in good conscience, stand by something he wasn’t proud of just because he’d be making big bucks from it.”When did he make that rule?
More importantly, when did he abandon it?
“Elf” was a piece of shit with a goofy script, too, so what Ferrell is saying doesn’t hold water. I’m guessing what Caan said is probably much closer to the truth.
“Oh my god, I finally got a franchise movieI could make some money, let my kids do what the hell they want to do.”Does James Caan have a gambling problem or something? How does a guy like him not have enough money for his kids?
I think this can be explained if you imagine he finished the sentence with “…for the rest of their natural lives.”
Look at the roles James Caan turned down in the 70s and what he took instead, it’s almost Troy McClure-like.
I thought Scott was perfectly enjoyable on the rebooted Hawaii Five-0, and figured maybe he could parlay that into a starring gig on another old-man show, a la Michael Weatherly.But I guess either he doesn’t want to do that or the various purveyors of old man fare (the rest of the CSI/NCIS-verse, Dick Wolf, etc.) don’t share my opinion of him.
I think “having enough money for his kids” and letting his kids “do what the hell they want to do” are different levels of wealth. James Caan money is probably “kids grow up, go to college, network into a solid entertainment executive job somewhere” and franchise money is “kids put an arena football team on a Jeff Bezos rocket for the lulz and their bank doesn’t blink”
The residuals from that Newsradio guest appearance just weren’t cutting it, I guess.
Can’t be worse than the blankly grinning, bargain basement Jack McBrayer version of Buddy the musical & animated versions foisted on us.
According to Will Ferrell “Well, first of all, I was a huge fan of getting back in that elf suit, but hey if I get a lot of laughs it’s worth it! But when I read the plot it was basically going to be about Buddy meeting his long lost cousins Lil’ Elfie played by Kevin Hart and Tim played by Jim Carrey, so I wouldn’t have been the only one rocking an elf outfit!” said Ferrell.
Jim Carrey mentioned a little bit about his role and some more of the plot. “The story was indeed to be epic as the trio of elves would have to settle their differences and work together to save Hanukah as a mysterious force is making people grouchy and people are losing their Christmas spirit,”
Ugh, maybe it was for the best.
That sounds anti-Semitic as hell! “You Jews would be so much happier if you just became Christians!”
“The sequel was poorly written reportedly”Well there’s an ironic sentence.
Yeah, I don’t want to be a jerk, but everyone should go back and re-read that entire paragraph. It’s a mess. If this had been an O’Neal article from back in the day, I would have assumed it was a meta joke. No offense to the author as this site likely requires its writers to pump out a LOT of output in not a lot of time. Proofreading is a luxury they can’t likely afford.
This whole network of sites appears to be thumbed out by distracted millennials queuing up in one uber-hip coffee shop you haven’t heard of, on the way to their job at another uber-hip coffee shop you haven’t heard of.
Well, like “Ferrels” said, it’s hard to turn down all that A. V. Club money.
“He wrote . . . poorly . . .”
They could have thought around all of their problems, if they had that much money to throw at Ferrell. Throw the screenplay in the trash, start over with a lower-cost sequel that was all stop motion. Everyone could do their lines from an isolated room, no one gets their feelies hurt, Caan gets more alimony for barking out a few lines, and everyone gets to catch up with the character that everyone REALLY cares about, Mr. Narwhal.
Ah. Good to know he has some sense of quality when picking his roles. Because from his filmography, I never would have guessed.
tbf, the original elf is also pretty bad
There’s no amount of on-screen humiliation I would not be willing to endure for 29 million dollars.
famous last words
I’m very happy to see I’m not the only one that thinks all his “films”are shit.
My wife and I did a weekend getaway for our anniversary and My Cousin Vinny came on the TV. She’s never seen it before! I’m amazed by that, but after re-watching it for the first time in forever: how the fuck did no one at any point after Marisa Tomei’s Oscar win didn’t they greenlight a sequel? Turns out, same thing: the pitch My Cousin Vinny II was it took them to Merry Ol England. It fell apart the moment Marisa Tomei noped the fuck out, which is fair.I didn’t find out about any of this until I got home and then fell down a rabbit hole of Joe Pesci’s Vincent LaGuardia Gambini Sings Just For You’s seminal vanity crooner mix albums (yes, ALBUMS). Even though they’re two completely different movies, the takeaway is always the same: we’d all love to see Joe Pesci get sent to gaol for approaching the bar without a proper solicitor’s wig in a classic callback just like we’d love to see classic callbacks of Will Ferrell as a live action Hermey getting yelled at by at least two older short tempered A-listers? Really makes you appreciate all the near misses we dodged that didn’t need to be made but got made anyway.That said, announcing no stealies on my My Cousin Vinny: The Series series which is basically Reverse Matlock and that’s all you get for now.
So what I’m hearing here is we’re not gettin Will Ferrell in the MCU or Star Wars anytime soon?
If that’s the case, it’d be kind of a missed opportunity. It feels like Ferrell (if deployed correctly, which is a big if) could be gold in a small role similar to, say, Ryan Reynolds or Kevin Hart in Hobbs & Shaw.
How much was he paid for the first one? Because he sure AF was over-paid.
It’s pretty sad that Ferrell said, meh, to $29 mil while Caan, who is a million times better actor and has been working for decades, was excited to finally make some big money.
Holmes And Watson star decrying the poor quality of a film script? I’ve never read an AV Club article on Pots calling Kettles black before now but here we go.
I don’t believe this for a second. Will had no problem doing Stepbrothers and Holmes and Watson, two of the absolute worst movies I’ve ever had the displeasure to watch. The James Caan explanation sounds much more believable.
I thought it was because he couldn’t get along with Jon Favreau.
This implies that he is proud of all the other irredeemable piece of shit movies he’s starred in. What’s up with that?
I know the article says they “don’t get on” but, given how I’d happily, no joke, suck Jon Favreau’s dick for $29 million dollars, I’m guessing “don’t get on” is an artful understatement.