One of the greatest comedies in the history of cinema will finally continue in a sequel. This Is Still Spinal Tap, anyone?
In an appearance on the RHLSTP With Richard Herring podcast, This Is Spinal Tap director Rob Reiner confirmed that the sequel, which will feature all the core members of everyone’s favorite pathetic heavy metal band Spinal Tap — David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean), Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest), and Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer) — will return in a new movie, along with actual legitimate rock stars Paul McCartney, Elton John and Garth Brooks.
The sequel, which was initially announced back at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, is set to go into production in 2024. Supposedly the film will “mimic” Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz, the famous concert film that documented the final peformance of The Band before they broke up.
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Here was Reiner’s previous statement on why, all these years later, he decided to make another Spinal Tap:
The plan is to do a sequel that comes out on the 40th anniversary of the original film and I can tell you hardly a day goes by without someone saying, why don’t you do another one? 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.
Spinal Tap debuted on a sketch special called The T.V. Show from 1979. The This Is Spinal Tap film, an ingenious faux documentary, followed a few years later, and for a while, McKean, Guest, and Shearer toured as Spinal Tap, playing concerts. (They were even the musical guests on an episode of Saturday Night Live.)
In 1992, they released an album of new songs, Break Like the Wind; in 2009, they released another album, Back From the Dead. The real men who portray Spinal Tap also subsequently created a second fictional band, the Folksmen, whose made-up history was chronicled in another fake documentary, A Mighty Wind.
I have no idea if this new Spinal Tap will be good or bad, but one thing is certain about it: The band’s drummer is living on borrowed time.
[H/T Variety]
