If there’s one thing that can be guaranteed, almost as sure as the sun will rise in the morning, it’s that Hollywood will make a sequel to a successful horror movie. Heck, sometimes they’ll make sequels to movies that weren’t successful in the first place just because horror is so damn cheap to produce. (Just look at “Leprechaun” and its many sequels.) Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work out that way. If it did, we’d have a sequel to “Tucker and Dale vs. Evil” by now. It turns out, we could have had a sequel, were it not for Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav.
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I recently had the chance to speak with director Eli Craig in honor of his excellent new movie “Clown in a Cornfield.” During the conversation, we touched on the attempts to get a sequel to his 2011 cult classic “Tucker and Dale” made over the years. While it has been in development at various points, it never fully got off the ground.
“Honestly, ‘Tucker and Dale 2’ has died more deaths than the college kids in ‘Tucker and Dale,”‘ Craig quipped. “We’ve had so many versions that have almost got off its feet or, for one reason or another, have gotten killed. It really does set us back that people can’t look at the box office, the actual box office, of the movie.”
For those who may need a refresher, the original film centers on a pair of affable hillbillies named Tucker (Alan Tudyk) and Dale (Tyler Labine) who are on vacation at their run-down mountain cabin when they are mistaken for murderers by a group of college kids. Bloody and funny hijinks ensue. Speaking further, Craig revealed that they were this close to getting a sequel made for cable TV before Zaslav pulled the plug:
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“It’s always been a struggle, and then when we do set it up, and we get all the pieces together, it gets killed somehow. We almost did a TV show with it that was on TNT/TBS, and you’ll be happy to know that David Zaslav, the slayer of all cinema [laughs], came in and put the final nail in the coffin for ‘Tucker and Dale’ as we were about to go to series, and just cancelled all production.”
Here’s what the Tucker and Dale TV show would have been about
While we don’t have time to go over Zaslav’s resume as an executive, as the head of Warner Bros. Discovery, he has axed billions of dollars worth of movie and TV projects in recent years. Most famously, he scrapped the already-filmed “Batgirl” movie for a tax write-off, and the company did the same for “Scoob! Holiday Haunt.” Zaslav tried that again with “Coyote vs. Acme,” only for Ketchup Entertainment to save the movie months later.
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The main thing to understand is that Zaslav is as brutal as any executive in the business when it comes to killing projects, no matter where they are in the process. For what it’s worth, Craig officially began developing a version of “Tucker and Dale vs. Evil 2” way back in 2014. Eventually, that shifted to a small screen version several years later. Craig also told me what the show would have looked like, and it sounds like it would have been very rewarding for fans of these characters:
“The TV show was more like — it’s not going to exist anymore — but it was more like Tucker and Dale, but detectives. Detective Tucker and Dale, like, stupidly trying to figure out what’s happening in a world where they’re always getting it wrong and people are dying around them […] It was Alan and Tyler, and it was…yeah. [Resigned shrug] What can you say?”
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Indeed, he was going to get Tudyk and Labine to reprise their roles in this TV version. It also seems like a great way to expand these characters with a TV-friendly premise. It sounds not unlike what Syfy and USA Network did with the “Chucky” TV show, which turned out pretty great, according to the general consensus.
Eli Craig wants Tucker and Dale fans to keep the hope alive
As for why Zaslav decided to kill the show? Craig didn’t get into the specifics, but these things always come down to dollars and cents. Cable TV is a more difficult business than it’s ever been in the age of streaming and cord cutting, with viewership dropping every year. With Warner Bros. Discovery focused on saving money, they may have viewed this as an investment that was too risky to justify.
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To Craig’s earlier point, “Tucker and Dale” was by no means a box office hit, but it’s taken on a life of its own over the last decade and change on DVD, Blu-ray, and streaming. It’s a true cult classic horror buddy comedy, and the box office numbers alone are not a good representation of the potential audience for a sequel to this movie. Still, the director also told fans to keep hope alive:
“It’s been through a lot of deaths. There’s a part of me that thinks it could be the first and last movie I ever make. Maybe I’ll be moving along on a walker with Tucker and Dale and we’re like, ‘We’re making this!’ I’ve never completely let go of the idea we’d make a sequel. And part of the reason people want to see a sequel is because it’s set up for it. ‘Tucker and Dale,’ when I wrote it, there were these elements I wanted to follow, like Chad is still alive, Allison and Dale’s story. So I always wanted to do a sequel, but Hollywood is a slayer of great ideas. But stay alive, fans! Because there’s always a possibility.”
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You can hear the full interview on today’s episode of the /Film Daily podcast:
“Clown in a Cornfield” is in theaters now.