Will Ferrell Discusses What Step Brothers 2 Might’ve Been

While Anchorman is generally championed as the finest union of director Adam McKay and star Will Ferrell, there’s a growing army of people who’d fight for Step Brothers. That movie, which co-starred John C. Reilly, was a success on its original release and richly rewards re-watches. But whilst there were murmurings about Step Brothers 2 around the time of its release, nothing was ever realized.

Of course, the same happened with Anchorman, with it taking some time before we got Anchorman 2. For Will Ferrell though, the temptation to do Step Brothers 2 seems to have disappeared. And now he’s offered an update about what ideas he and McKay were toying with for a Step Brothers sequel shortly after that movie’s 2008 release. Hint: It might’ve been even more bizarre, all things considered.

“We talked about Step Brothers, and then Adam and I got sidetracked with other things,” Ferrell said to The Daily News. “We had a whole story where John 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.”

That certainly sounds nuts enough for the world created by the first zany movie, but Ferrell repeated a familiar concern: despite he and McKay being happy with Anchorman 2, there were plenty of fans and critics who weren’t. Sometimes it’s best to leave things be.

“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. “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.”

These thoughts are reminiscent of Ferrell’s previous comments to Rolling Stone about the likely abandoned Step Brothers sequel.

“You have to resist the temptation,” he told Rolling Stone. “It’s just tough because the things everyone wants you to do sequels of are special because there’s not a sequel of it. I guess we’ll see, but as of now there are no plans. We just don’t want to be doing sequels of everything.”

Addressing the backlash against Anchorman 2, which didn’t seem to go down anywhere near as well as the first, Ferrell added that “I think we personally feel great about what we did with Anchorman 2, and I think there are actually some people who like it more than the original. But then you always get that little bit of people saying, ‘Awww, why’d they have to do that?”

That won’t be happening with Step Brothers, anyway…