In 2010, one of the greatest cinematic treasures of all time was birthed from the minds of Will Forte, Jorma Taccone, and John Solomon: MacGruber. The deeply silly action-comedy expertly skewered not only the TV show on which it was based, MacGyver, but also some of the more ridiculous action movie tropes we’ve come to accept over the years. While most films based on SNL sketches are rightly relegated to the gas station bargain bin of history, MacGruber was something else entirely. Though it was considered a commercial failure at the box office, it has gone on to become a cult classic, garnering legions of fans and forever ruining celery sticks for countless others. While I was interviewing Jorma Taccone at the Sundance Film Festival about his new film L.A. Times, the subject of MacGruber and its long-rumored sequel came up, and thankfully the director provided a few new details about the project.
While the project is not actively in production, he and the team behind the original are doing everything they can to get a sequel made. In particular, Taccone revealed that the sequel’s title will be neither boring and lazy like MacGruber 2 nor will it be called Mac2ber like I suggested in my dozens of hand-written fan letters. Rather, Taccone said the sequel is going to take a page out of Jason Bourne’s playbook. Does that mean we’ll be getting a The MacGruber Supremacy or a The MacGruber Distraction anytime soon? Probably not, but that just means there’s more time for us to brainstorm cool, potential titles.
And if we’re lucky, Taccone and his colleague won’t stop there. “We want to make five of these motherfuckers,” Taccone added towards the end of our conversation. Sure it might have been an off-handed joke, but I’d like to believe that there’s a world out there where the MacGruber Pentalogy is a thing that exists and is available through the Criterion Collection.
Stay tuned for our longer interview with Taccone about L.A. Times, and make sure to check out all of our Sundance 2017 coverage.
What do you want to see from a MacGruber sequel? Let us know in the comments below.
Image: Universal
Dan Casey is the senior editor of Nerdist and the author of books about Star Wars and the Avengers. Follow him on Twitter and ask him about putting together a squad (@Osteoferocious).
