{"id":75617,"date":"2025-08-11T21:43:08","date_gmt":"2025-08-11T21:43:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/75617\/"},"modified":"2025-08-11T21:43:08","modified_gmt":"2025-08-11T21:43:08","slug":"the-naked-gun-producers-talk-sequel-possibilities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/75617\/","title":{"rendered":"The Naked Gun Producers Talk Sequel Possibilities"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe Naked Gun<\/a> has been held up as a bellwether for the viability of studio comedies in the post-pandemic era, and this past weekend, the comedy reboot proved its staying power. The feature, directed by Akiva Schaffer and starring Liam Neeson, dropped just 50 percent in its sophomore outing, bringing its domestic total to $33 million, and its global haul to $56.4 million.<\/p>\n

\n\tProducers Seth MacFarlane<\/a> and Erica Huggins<\/a> hope The Naked Gun is the first of a new wave of comedies that will find theatrical audiences.<\/p>\n

\n\tOutside of Naked Gun, Macfarlane and Huggins-headed Fuzzy Door<\/a> has a varied slate that runs the gamut from a Peacock series based on the late \u201980s horror-comedy The Burbs to a doc on Carl Sagan to Macfarlane\u2019s Frank Sinatra tribute album Lush Life: The Lost Sinatra. MacFarlane says, \u201cTo put it this way: You can make spark plugs and breakfast cereals at the same time, and if there\u2019s a market for both, then why not?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tMacFarlane and Huggins talk to THR about the \u201cdouble-edged sword\u201d of testing comedies, what lessons Hollywood should take from Naked Gun\u2019s performance, and sequel plans.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat has the response been to Naked Gun\u2019s performance?<\/p>\n

\n\tERICA HUGGINS I\u2019ve gotten so many incoming calls and texts and emails from well-wishers, and that doesn\u2019t always happen. (Laughs.) For the first time, you can feel the goodwill from every single producer, all the agencies, from actors, from people who just want comedy.<\/p>\n

\n\tSETH MACFARLANE I just got a text from a retired Family Guy writer, which tells you how long the show has been on the air.\u00a0 \u201cA retired Family Guy writer.\u201d He said he was at a barber shop at Amherst, Massachusetts. It\u2019s a six-chair place, and everybody was talking about The Naked Gun.<\/p>\n

\n\tIf that isn\u2019t a glowing review, I don\u2019t know what is. What was the biggest hurdle to get the greenlight on this movie?<\/p>\n

\n\tHUGGINS The biggest thing to overcome was the question: \u201cWill a movie like this \u2014 a spoof movie, that we haven\u2019t seen in at least a decade \u2014 work for today\u2019s audience?\u201d Then, the next question always became, \u201cWho is the audience? Is it nostalgia only? Is it the older crowd? How do we get the younger crowd?\u201d And then it always came back to budget. The other big part to overcome was that we needed dramatic actors to play the comedy, and play it straight.<\/p>\n

\n\tHow did you convince the studio that Liam Neeson was the right choice?<\/p>\n

\n\tMACFARLANE I don\u2019t know that we ever did. Eventually, they just got tired of us. There have been other iterations of this franchise attempted over the years and oftentimes it is a comedian, and usually a terrific comedian, who is announced as the lead. One of the fundamental edicts of the [original Naked Gun creators] Zucker Brothers was you played against the comedy. You cast people like Robert Stack, Peter Graves and Leslie Nielsen. There were no comics, and it just worked every single time when they stuck to that.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the opening weekend exit numbers, nearly half the audience was in the 18 to 34 demo. What do you make of that?<\/p>\n

\n\tHUGGINS All the previous Naked Guns were PG-13. Akiva was extremely aware of what that did for him as a kid. It allowed him access, even though it was still a little bit risqu\u00e9.<\/p>\n

\n\tMACFARLANE Younger audiences don\u2019t really have the same comedy filmography attached to their experience of growing up as we did. We had movies like Planes, Trains and Automobiles and Caddyshack. In the \u201990s, they had comedies like Home Alone and in the early 2000s 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up. It\u2019s been a while since a generation has had a comedy or series of comedies that define their decade.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe marketing for this movie leaned into the reality that there haven\u2019t been broad comedies in theaters. Why do you think that played well?<\/p>\n

\n\tMACFARLANE It was an easy choice for the studio to just dive into, because there has not been a true, hard comedy in a long time. In the \u201980s, you had shows like Cheers that were comedies. They had jokes, they had laughs, they were true comedies that would also be recognized during award season. You don\u2019t see that anymore. [Today] you see essentially dramas with a smattering of jokes in comedy categories. I think it was pretty easy for the studio to take that reality and say, \u201cHey, we know what you\u2019re looking for. Here\u2019s some water in the desert.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHow important is audience testing when it comes to releasing a comedy for modern audiences?<\/p>\n

\n\tMACFARLANE Testing is such a double-edged sword. It is hugely valuable in the same way that it\u2019s hugely valuable to workshop your stand-up set, to know what jokes work and what don\u2019t, and to take different parts of the country and see how different audiences react. The only downside is some of the stuff that sticks in the long run, that\u2019s the stuff that\u2019s a little weirder, so it doesn\u2019t really land right away.<\/p>\n

\n\tHUGGINS The things that audiences love the most and hate the most are the things that are most talked about, too. You have to be careful about not just cutting it off because you get a couple of cards that say it offends people. You want to try and find a balance.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe narrative for comedies and movie musicals is that these two genres have to constantly prove themselves every time they go into a theater.<\/p>\n

\n\tMACFARLANE It sure is!<\/p>\n

\n\tHeading into opening weekend, did you feel that pressure?<\/p>\n

\n\tHUGGINS The question was, \u201cWill a comedy work in the theaters?\u201d Because they are so easy to access on Netflix. All the comedies now seem to be accumulating on streaming, and so it\u2019s just a different experience from laughing in a crowd. I think [it\u2019s about] re-teaching audiences to buy a ticket and go to a packed theater and see a funny movie.<\/p>\n

\n\tMACFARLANE All the great comedies that we look at as sort of these benchmark moments in our culture and in our own lives, they\u2019re all theatrical. I can\u2019t really think of a single streaming comedy that has that kind of collective hold on the zeitgeist. Maybe they\u2019re out there and I don\u2019t know them. Streaming comedies, some of them, of course, being very good, just kind of come and go. There\u2019s a tendency to think of the theater as something that\u2019s on its way out, but I really think that\u2019s a mistake.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat lessons do you want Hollywood to take away from the performance of Naked Gun?<\/p>\n

\n\tMACFARLANE Take risks. Make movies that aren\u2019t just reboots \u2014 wait a second. The lesson is that people want something that\u2019s outside the usual fare. We\u2019re just so deluged with superhero movies at this point that. It\u2019s like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, when he wakes up on that last morning, says, \u201cAnything different is good.\u201d People want a little more variety on their plate.<\/p>\n

\n\tFuzzy Door has a varied slate \u2014 from a Peacock series based on The Burbs to a doc on Carl Sagan \u2014 what are studios and streamers saying they are buying right now?<\/p>\n

\n\tHUGGINS I haven\u2019t seen a lot of interest in buying a hard comedy. It\u2019s harder to understand what that is if you haven\u2019t done it. People want something that feels original, and then in the same breath, they want something that everybody already loves. It\u2019s about good material, regardless of the genre. We\u2019re betting on our taste.<\/p>\n

\n\tMACFARLANE Taste is everything. There\u2019s so much examining of marketing data, which, if it was worth a damn, every movie and TV show would be a huge hit. You look at somebody like Dana Walden, who just has really good taste and just continues to succeed and succeed and succeed. At the end of the day, you have this thing called a brain, and if you\u2019re running a production company or a studio it is incumbent on you to use that brain and make decisions based on things that you think are of quality or not, marketing data be damned. People don\u2019t want a genre until they do.<\/p>\n

\n\tHave there been talks about a Naked Gun sequel?<\/p>\n

\n\tHUGGINS Absolutely. We\u2019ve now had enough conversations among the filmmakers, and certainly with Pam [Anderson] and Liam, too, when we were selling the movie in the blue sky version of what could happen next, yes, we were thinking about where it could go and what it could be. Akiva and Dan and Doug, our writers, we\u2019re all talking about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Naked Gun has been held up as a bellwether for the viability of studio comedies in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":75618,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,53713,53714,206,35375,16491],"class_list":{"0":"post-75617","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-erica-huggins","10":"tag-fuzzy-door","11":"tag-movies","12":"tag-seth-macfarlane","13":"tag-the-naked-gun"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75617"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75617\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}