Is anyone out there really excited or even good at remembering that there is a
Bad Santa 2 being released this holiday season? I keep trying to remember, but with all of the annual Oscar season contenders beginning to make their presence known as well as a large amount of tentpoles by way of a
Star Wars movie, a
Harry Potter movie, a new Marvel movie, and even something as epically original as
Passengers on the horizon it seems to be getting more and more difficult to recall the fact we're also getting a sequel to a thirteen year-old R-rated Christmas comedy that probably should have come out a decade ago if it really cared about being anticipated by anyone. Instead, Broad Green Pictures and Miramax are counting on the age of social-media made nostalgia awareness we're all currently existing
in at the moment to give them a solid return on their investment in the Billy Bob Thornton/innocent icons talking dirty franchise. Of course, we all saw how this line of thinking worked out earlier this year when Paramount tried the same thing with the fifteen year-later sequel to Ben Stiller's
Zoolander. That property was arguably more "viral" than
Bad Santa and had developed more of a cult following in the time since its somewhat disappointing initial release. Add to that the fact
Zoolander was rated PG-13 as opposed to the very R-rated
Bad Santa and we could have a recipe for disaster here. Granted, the original
Bad Santa made $60 million domestically on a $23 million budget, but with the lag between sequels I have to doubt the staying power of that original is as strong as some of the other reboots and sequels we've seen trying to ride this wave of nostalgia. In short, whereas something like
Anchorman 2 was able to still succeed based on the fact it had defined part of the zeitgeist of the time in which it came out and parlayed that into a new movie that moved past the original
Bad Santa 2 looks to be a redux of the original with cuss words taking the place of actual punch lines. I hope I'm wrong, but we'll find out how good of an idea
Bad Santa 2 was when it opens on November 23rd, 2016. The film also stars Kathy Bates, Christina Hendricks, Ryan Hansen, Cristina Rosato, and features the return of Tony Cox and Brett Kelly as Marcus and Thurman Merman.
