Fvck you, Will Ferrell. Not a sentence I thought I would write on my Friday night, but here I am.
Elf is one of my favorite Christmas movies of all time. It should damn well be one of yours, too. It was awesome. It was a box office SMASH — making $220M on a $33M budget.
And, apparently, there could have been more to the story.
Will fvcking Ferrell, the dick, didn’t want to do it. He didn’t want to do it even though they offered him $29M to do the damn thing.
Yo… for Twenty Nine Million Dollars…. there is not much that I wouldn’t do. Seriously.
“I would have had to promote the movie from an honest place, which would’ve been, like, ‘Oh no, it’s not good. I just couldn’t turn down that much money,’” Ferrell told The Hollywood Reporter. “And I thought, ‘Can I actually say those words? I don’t think I can, so I guess I can’t do the movie.’”
Bro. Stahp.
You have made plenty of shitty movies.
Holmes & Watson.
Daddy’s Home 2.
Daddy’s Home 1.
Get Hard.
The Internship.
Everything Must Go.
The Other Guys.
Bewitched.
Kicking & Screaming.
The Wendall Baker Story.
I mean…. honestly… Will…. you probably have more miss than hit.
The news really isn’t all that shocking. The dollar amount is…. but in 2020, James Caan, who played Buddy the Elf’s biological father in the movie, discussed what went sideways with Elf 2 on 92.3 The Fan, suggesting that it fell apart because Ferrell didn’t get along with Elf director Jon Favreau.
Caan said, “The director and Will didn’t get along very well. Will wanted to do it, and he didn’t want the director. He had it in his contract. It was one of those things.”
Elf has been turned into an animated special, and a video game, and a successful Broadway musical. So, there are plenty of opportunities to get Elf in your life, if you want…
Elf 2 might have sucked, who knows… I would have watched it. And I damn sure would have taken $29M to make it.
