It may have taken Hollywood nearly 40 years to greenlight a sequel to Spaceballs, but the upcoming spoof now looks like it’s on the fast track to production. In the months since Amazon MGM Studios officially announced Spaceballs 2, development has been steady. According to Josh Gad, who’s co-writing, producing, and starring, a script draft has been completed, which means production could begin in earnest soon.
“Without MGM taking me into their Culver prison cells, I can tell you that the draft is done. Everybody who’s read it has been blown away,” Gad recently told Forbes. “I can’t tell you anything beyond [the] process at this point, but I can tell you every hour of every day right now is spent making this project closer and closer to reality — and I think we’re nearing the end zone here.”
Gad is co-writing Spaceballs 2 with Benji Samit and Dan Hernandez, the duo behind films like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem and Detective Pikachu. There’s no word on which stage of production their script is in, but based on Gad’s encouraging update, it may not be long before the screenplay is approved and filming officially begins.
A sequel to Spaceballs wasn’t particularly high on anyone’s wishlist, but Hollywood’s affinity for older IP is stronger than ever. In a way, the franchise’s return is timely; it’s been decades since any satire skewered sci-fi like Spaceballs did, and the genre has come a long way since 1987. The original film may be best known as a Star Wars spoof, but it didn’t ignore other popular sci-fi like the Star Trek and Alien franchises. According to director Josh Greenbaum, Spaceballs 2 will follow that same brief.
“There’s been a ton of Star Wars content,” Greenbaum recently told Esquire. “It’s just exploded beyond the fact that there have been not three but six Star Wars films made—and that’s just in the Star Wars universe. So there’s a lot of new [material to satirize], but we also certainly focus on continuing the old, so it is a true sequel.”
Such a wide scope is a lot for one film to accommodate, and with so many major sci-fi sagas to choose from, it was easy to assume that Gad, Samit, and Hernandez would bite off more than they could chew. That could very well still be the case, but Gad’s update sounds promising, as there at least appears to be a sense of focus. Maybe the film won’t be as unnecessary as many fans assumed it would be, and we’re certainly overdue for a good satire.
