Director Rob Reiner was recently interviewed by Deadline and talked about the progress on the sequel to “This Is Spinal Tap”. You’ll be happy to hear that he said, “It’s going good. Our first screening for our family and friends will be probably in August, and then sometime in September we’ll start showing it to distributors, and we’re hoping to have it out sometime late spring or early summer of next year.”
If you’ve kept up with the sequel updates, you know that Metallica’s Lars Ulrich and Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Chad Smith both have cameos in the sequel.
Reiner will once again write and direct, and original stars/writers Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer are back as Nigel Tufnel, David St Hubbins and Derek Smalls. Reiner will also return as the documentarian Martin “Marty” DiBergi.
Reiner said, “We got everybody together and we added a couple of surprise guests. We have Paul McCartney and Elton John and Garth Brooks. It’s fun.”
The sequel will also see the return of Fran Drescher, who will reprise her role as the band’s publicist, Bobbi Flekman. You’ll also see newcomers John Michael Higgins, Jason Acuña, Don Lake, Nina Conti, Griffin Matthews, Kerry Godliman, Chris Addison, Brad Williams and musician Paul Shaffer.
“Spinal Tap II” filmed in New Orleans starting March 6 ’24 and continuing through April 12 ’24. It shot under the working title “Goodbye, Cleveland” — a reference to a scene in the 1984 original film in which its bungling band members get lost backstage at a concert.
In 2022, Reiner told Deadline about the decision to release a new “Spinal Tap” movie, “For so many years, we said, ‘nah.’ It wasn’t until we came up with the right idea how to do this. You don’t want to just do it, to do it. You want to honor the first one and push it a little further with the story.”
As for the new movie’s premise, Reiner said, “They’ve played Albert Hall, played Wembley Stadium, all over the country and in Europe. They haven’t spent any time together recently. The idea was that Ian Faith, who was their manager, he passed away. In reality, Tony Hendra passed away. Ian’s widow inherited a contract that said SPINAL TAP owed them one more concert. She was basically going to sue them if they didn’t. All these years and a lot of bad blood we’ll get into and they’re thrown back together and forced to deal with each other and play this concert.”
Of course when “This Is Spinal Tap” came out, not everyone realized it was a “mockumentary.” U2’s The Edge said, “I didn’t laugh, I wept. It was so close to the truth.” Ozzy Osbourne said he thought it was a real documentary.
Iconic. Wonder if this sequel will come close to the original? Doubt it, but we’ll see.
