If Superbad were released today instead of 2007, it’s hard to imagine it wouldn’t get a sequel. Studios are much more franchise-focused now than they were 11 years ago, and the $160 million global box office the comedy brought in would be more than enough for the folks at Sony to instantly greenlight a sequel. Of course, that doesn’t mean the creatives behind the movie would necessarily be on-board – and, in fact, it’s an idea that Seth Rogen always shunned because he never felt a Superbad 2 would be as organic as the original.
I had the pleasure of sitting down with Seth Rogen at a recent Los Angeles press day for the upcoming Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising, and it was while discussing the new film (which is actually his first live-action sequel) that we got onto the subject of Superbad 2. I mentioned that I had interviewed Judd Apatow last year and how he had told me how much he wanted to make a follow-up to the Greg Mottola-directed comedy, but Rogen explained why it was something he was never on-board with:
To us, it was such a personal story. It was about us, and there was just no… So what? Now the next one is about how we’re going to college? But we didn’t go to college together. I didn’t go to college. It seemed very inorganic, but that was the only reason, really.
Going further, Seth Rogen also noted that writing Superbad 2 wouldn’t make sense to him today anyway, given that he feels like he has reached a certain age where there is a particular disconnect from his voice and the voice of the younger generation. This fact even managed to present an issue in the making of his latest movie:
And also, I don’t know how I would write a movie about high school kids now, or around that age. Even the small, the girls, the sorority girls in [Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising], it was very hard to write their characters. We have to talk to them a lot about what they would do and say in the situations that we had presented.
Do you think that Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg should have taken a whack at a Superbad 2, or are you happy that it was never put in motion? Hit the comments below with your thoughts, and stay tuned for more from my interview with Seth Rogen!
And while we may not get a Seth Rogen sequel in the form of Superbad 2, you can check out Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising when it arrives in theaters this Friday, May 20th.
