Make sure to lock up your booze and hide Mrs. Santa’s sister next holiday season, ’cause Bad Santa 2 is coming to town in fall of 2016.
The seriously dark comedy, Bad Santa (or Badder Santa on unrated DVD), was released in 2003, and delivered a caricature of a surly, frisky and foul-mouthed mall Santa Claus/heist thief who finds himself oddly attached to one little boy who doesn’t have much of a family. Directed by Terry Zwigoff (Ghost World, Art School Confidential) and starring Billy Bob Thornton (Fargo, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot), the movie reveled in levels of raunch that were more or less unheard of in the usually family-friendly genre of holiday comedies. But the gamble to make a properly twisted Christmas movie paid off, both in laughs and at the box office, where the film earned over $76 million, a whopping return on a movie that cost less than a third of that to make.
Now, over a decade later, Thornton, as well as Tony Cox (the elf helper and criminal mastermind) and Brett Kelly (the young and innocent Thurman Merman), will all reprise their roles in the sequel directed by Mark Waters (Mean Girls). And if that line-up of talent wasn’t enough to pique your interest, Academy Award-winning actress Kathy Bates (Titanic, Revolutionary Road) will also be joining the cast as Willie Soke’s mom. That’s right, in the new movie we’ll get a glimpse at the woman who brought the suicidal, sadistic, sex-addicted Bad Santa into the world.
Who knows, maybe all of those behaviors were recessive.
The movie is slated to hit theaters on November 23, 2016, and will be written by Johnny Rosenthal, Shauna Cross, and Doug Ellin. All we know is that we can’t wait to see how the sequel manages to top the first movie. Hopefully no elves will be harmed in the making of the film.
What do you think about a sequel to Bad Santa? Are you bracing for Billy Bob to blow you away with another nearly X-rated performance, or do you think they should have retired this particular Mall Santa after his first tour of cinematic duty? Let us know in the comments section below!
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Image: Dimension Films via deviantART // Humourous