As much as we loved the first Anchorman, the sequel was a bitter disappointment.
A lot of it might have been down to the fact that the jokes were stretched out to accommodate a two-hour runtime - WAY too long for a comedy - and you had jokes that just didn't land. At all.
Anyway, after the equally disappointing reviews and box-office returns, it seemed that was all she wrote for Anchorman. In many ways, it was, however director Adam McKay's now a bit more circumspect about the whole thing.
"I said about a month ago that we'd never do a third one, and I realized that was a little too harsh because the truth is, I really don't know. With these movies, you really don’t know how they've played until about two years after they come out, when people see them on repeat viewing. That tends to be how our movies work."
He's not wrong about the repeat viewing, mind. The first Anchorman flourished thanks to DVD sales and rentals, however the second Anchorman was bad no matter how many times you watched it.
In any case, McKay is floating the idea of a third one and, to be honest, the idea sounds pretty terrible. "We talked about doing one that was about the rise of the new media. I also thought there was something to the idea - and who knows, maybe we will do one some day - I also thought it’d be cool to have Ron Burgundy get embedded in the Iraq War. We kicked around that idea. But we’ve never got that serious about it, but it would have to be the next stage of what the media has become."
The weakest parts of Anchorman 2 were when they focused on the high-speed pursuit things and lampooned the media. Nobody cared and it was essentially the same with Anchorman. The whole panda watch thing was the framing device, but it was how they interacted with it all that made it so funny.
In a lot of ways, Anchorman is our generation's Caddyshack. The first one set the bar so high, there was no way the sequel would be able to match it.
Via Yahoo! Movies