Here Is Will Ferrell’s Scrapped But Perfect Pitch for ‘Step Brothers 2’

Did we just become best friends… again?

It’s probably for the best that, outside of Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, Will Ferrell and Adam McKay haven’t shown any interest in turning their beloved 2000s comedies into soulless franchises with new installments every few years. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby is an objectively perfect movie, and Ricky Bobby’s ballad ended on too high of a note to continue the song. The Other Guys was the right action-comedy-economic-satire for its time, but, after The Big Short, McKay would be moving backwards if he tried to make another one. 

But Step Brothers? Well, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to know what Brennan and Dale are up to 16 years after the fucking Catalina Wine Mixer — and so would Will Ferrell. In fact, Ferrell had an incredible idea prepared for a second Step Brothers film that he shared with the Daily News back in 2018, a pitch that may not have been any more successful than the “Prestige Worldwide” presentation, but it gets your brain humming even more than “Boats ‘n’ Hoes.”

In Ferrell’s vision for Step Brothers 2, Nancy and Robert, in their advanced age and with their family united again, would move into a retirement community — and Brennan and Dale would go with them.

“We talked about (a sequel to) Step Brothers, and then Adam and I got sidetracked with other things,” Ferrell said about the future of the man-children brought together by their parents’ marriage to build bunk beds and crash boats. “We had a whole story where John (C. Reilly) 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.”

The idea that Mary Steenburgen and Richard Jenkins would only get a handful of years without their sons mooching off of them before Brennan and Dale literally retire from being grown-ups is a perfect follow-up to the cult-beloved R-rated comedy on paper, but, as Ferrell admitted, the art of the sequel is as fickle as the audience. 

“The sequel thing is so funny because, we decided obviously to go down the road with Anchorman, and we made what I thought was a really great sequel, really funny,” Ferrell said of his and McKay’s only second installment ever. “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.’ So I guess it’s a catch-22. It’s a nice catch-22, because people love the movies in the first place.”

Given that Ferrell was concerned about the reception to Anchorman 2 despite the fact that the film grossed $173 million at the box office, we shouldn’t expect the two halves of Gary Sanchez Productions to collaborate on another sequel any time soon. Besides, as Ferrell says, both he and McKay are too busy now — there’s no more room in their schedules for activities.