Roughly 17 years ago, Peter and Bobby Farrelly came onto the scene with the raunchy comedy Dumb & Dumber, pairing Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels as Lloyd Christmas and Harry Dunne. Apparently everyone in Hollywood had been offered a role in the movie, but many of them turned it down, not realizing what a huge popular hit it would become. 17 years later, the four of them are finally reuniting to try to make a real sequel to the movie called Dumb and Dumber To.
It’s an odd decision being that the Farrellys generally haven’t done sequels and Carrey himself has shied away from them in the past few years. In fact, he had been in and out of this project a number of times in the last year alone.
Peter Farrelly explained how this finally came together when ComingSoon.net spoke to him for his upcoming comedy anthology Movie 43 earlier today.
“If we were going to do a sequel it was always going to be ‘Dumb and Dumber,'” he told us. “There were no other movies we’ve made that are real sequel type movies–maybe ‘The Three Stooges.’ We always said that it would be fun to do another one just because it was such a fun experience and we kind of left them off where they started in that movie so it is the kind of thing you could do a couple of them. But over the years, Jim didn’t want to do another one, until recently, about a year ago or so, he called us up and he was in a hotel watching TV and ‘Dumb & Dumber’ came on and he sat there howling and said, ‘We gotta do another one!’ and I said, ‘That’s awesome, let’s do it.'”
Obviously, Farrelly isn’t going to give too many details about what Lloyd and Harry have been up to, but he promised that we’d find that out in the movie, as he told us that they have a script they’re happy with and ready to make even if they hadn’t started production in September as planned.
“We have the script and I will say this: I love the script but if I told you about the script, you’d be completely impressed, but if I told you about the first one–‘Well, what’s it about?’ ‘It’s about these two guys that find this briefcase and they follow this girl to Aspen.’ You’d say, ‘Well, where’s the movie?’ It’s not about the plot, it’s about the characters. It’s a really hard movie to explain to people and make them see it, but I guarantee you that it’s sort of exactly like the first one. We pick up from that 20 years later, we explain what they’ve done for the last 17 or 18 years, we take off from that and it’s just a lot of laughs. It’s at Warner Bros. and right now it’s being financed outside the studio, but it will be released by Warner Bros.–knock on wood–and that’s all being worked out right now.”
“If you liked ‘Dumb & Dumber,’ you’ll like this because it’s the same and more. It’s really fun,” he added.
And what about a possible sequel to 2011’s The Three Stooges, a movie that the Farrellys had been trying to get made for many years and finally made happen with Will Sasso, Sean Hayes and Chris Diamantopoulos in the main roles as Curly, Larry and Moe?
“It’s going to make money, but it was disappointing for me because I thought it came out at a really crappy time,” Farrelly opined. “It came out in the middle of April when kids were back in school, they were already back from vacation, so it did really well on the weekend and it did nothing during the week because kids were in school, but I loved that movie and those three guys in it are geniuses. I could not be prouder of a movie than I am of that movie. The casting was unbelievable. A minute into ‘The Three Stooges,’ you forget it’s not Moe, Larry and Curly. I have no regret and yeah, would I do another one? In a heartbeat. It was a ball to make.”
Look for our full interview with Farrelly sometime before January 25 when Movie 43 is released nationwide.
