It’s been 13 years now, and we’re finally 100% comfortable saying this: we love Joe Dirt. Yes, it’s a dumb movie about a mullet-sporting David Spade traveling the country in search of his deadbeat parents, but it’s a funny dumb movie about a mullet-sporting David Spade traveling the country in search of his deadbeat parents. And it looks like it’s finally getting a sequel, according to a recent Reddit AMA with David Spade (via Coming Soon).
“We wrote a sequel,” says Spade. “And we may wind up doing it on Crackle.com, because they want to be the first web address to do a sequel to a movie. Because Sony owns them, and it’s a Sony movie. We’re trying to find a way to make it for the budget, but we really want to do it. And keep it good.”
Believe it or not, this would not be the first time David Spade has tried to revive Joe Dirt as a multimedia franchise. TBS was working on an animated pilot for a Joe Dirt television series back in 2010, but as you may have noticed, nothing came of it.
If produced for Crackle.com, Joe Dirt may also prove a potential game changer in the feature film distribution paradigm. Sites like Amazon Prime and Netflix have already made great strides in producing new serialized television shows for instant streaming markets, and many films make their debut on VOD, but producing new movies based on existing properties with a built-in demographic (however small the Joe Dirt demographic may be) may give new life to films that did well enough to develop an audience, but not quite well enough to justify a studio-driven franchise. And without the stigma of going “Straight-To-DVD.”
The trick, as Spade puts it, is to find a way to produce a decent movie within the budgetary limitations of this new marketplace.
“We’re putting it together now and seeing if we can keep it as funny and with the music we like for a lower budget. All the movies you hear about being made now keep running into budget problems, this and that, and it sounds boring, but it’s just a new world, where they can’t make those $15-30 million comedies anymore. It’s either $3 million or $200 million, there’s almost no in-between, so everyone’s adjusting to either a summer tentpole Avengers-type movie, or learning to get down and dirty and gritty and making a smaller movie. I just don’t want to burn the fans and want to make it good, so me and the other writer are combing through the sequel and trying to make it make sense and have good music and be funny within the parameters. So hopefully it will be soon, or it will be too pointless.”
David Spade also added that if the Joe Dirt sequel gets off the ground, there are parts available for his original co-stars Christopher Walken and Kid Rock… if they want to return, of course.
Until the Joe Dirt sequel gets off the ground, just remember: Life’s a garden. Dig it.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
