Universal agrees to make "Dumb and Dumber To" for some reason

I want to like the Farrelly brothers, I really do. They seem like the nicest guys ever, and you have to respect their desire to just do their own thing, but boy are they ever on an epic cold streak. As much as they believed in it, remaking the Three Stooges was a dog of an idea from the beginning, and even when I go back and watch the Farrelly Brothers movies I once considered classics, like Kingpin, they feel really dated. It’s to the point that I didn’t even think it was that big of news when Warner Bros decided to walk away from the planned sequel “Dumb and Dumber To” earlier this week. It just seemed like a logical decision. It seems like much bigger news that another studio actually wants to make it.

Yeah, good luck with that, Universal:

Universal Pictures has closed a deal for domestic distribution on Dumb And Dumber To, the sequel to the classic comedy that brings back Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels, with Peter and Bobby Farrelly directing their rewrite of the script by Sean Anders and John Morris [Hot Tub Time Machine, Sex Drive].

Wolf Of Wall Street financier Red Granite is stepping up to finance the $35 million budget film and sell foreign territories. Deadline reported this is how it would likely go after Warner Bros finally stepped away from the project. That studio will retain a participation stake in the film, but its exit made all this possible.

All this is going down as we speak, and now the scheduling will begin for a movie that will find its way into production very quickly, with Conundrum’s Bradley Thomas and The Farrellys producing with Charlie Wessler. The film will be PG-13 like the original, and once again it puts Lloyd (Carrey) and Harry (Daniels) back on a road trip. The urgency has to do with scheduling: Daniels needs to do it soon before returning for his Aaron Sorkin HBO series The Newsroom. [Deadline]

I’ve seen Dumb and Dumber as many times as everyone else, but there’s a limit to my nostalgia. I’d love to see the Farrelys and Daniels/Carrey do it just right, aging into gags that recapture the old magic while being more suited to a 58 and a 51-year-old, but rooting for aging comedians/comedy directors to harness the glory of their younger years is almost as heartbreaking as it is rooting for aging boxers to do same. I worry that the idea that Jeff Daniels has to rush his diarrhea movie into production so he can play Aaron Sorkin’s smarm avatar on The Newsroom is going to be funnier than anything in the movie. Because come on, that’s just beautiful. Someone should really make a nice Coldplay montage out of Jeff Daniels’s explosive diarrhea scene.

Then again, “Dumb and Dumber To?” With a title that hilarious, what could go wrong?

×