When it comes to fantastical holiday-skewing comedies hitting the 2024 movie schedule, the big-budget romp Red One (read our review) has garnered the most ad time, but no one should be ignoring Jack Black’s reuniting with Shallow Hal’s Bobby and Peter Farrelly for the high-concept new streaming movie Dear Santa. The film marks the brothers’ first partnership on a feature film since 2014’s Dumb & Dumber To, which sparked questions about sequels to some of their biggest hits, including There’s Something About Mary.
When speaking to Variety about working with Jack Black’s Satan in their most recent comedy, the duo were asked about potential follow-ups to their past efforts, and Peter Farrelly admitted that he’s in some ways always preparing to return to the lives of Jeff Daniels’ Harry Dunne and Jim Carrey’s Lloyd Christmas. As he put it:
I still take notes whenever I hear something that I think would be a good Dumb and Dumber joke. I keep a list because I could easily see us doing another Dumb and Dumber someday.
Peter Farrelly
To his point, Dumb and Dumber remains one of the most memorable comedies of the 1990s, as well as a career highlight for Jim Carrey, though neither the brothers’ sequel Dumb and Dumber To nor the Farrelly-free prequel Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd came anywhere close to matching the original film’s dimwitted whimsy.
Bobby Farrelly went even further and said they’d even be down to wait another decade before doing it just so it’d match up with their past effort. In his words:
We did it on the 20th anniversary, and right now we’re at the 30th anniversary. So in 10 years… Those guys are so much fun to work with. If we’re all still kicking around, I’d love to do that.
Bobby Farrelly
For whatever reason, I do think it would be a strange kind of joy to witness Harry and Lloyd still stumbling through life's foibles while in their 60s. But not before I'd want to see Cameron Diaz and Ben Stiller return to the big screen as the bubbly Mary Jensen and the eternally cringe-bound Ted Stroehmann, respectively.
Hopes For There's Something About Mary Sequel
After addressing the potential for a return to the IQ-deficient world of Dumb and Dumber, Bobby Farrelly brought up their 1998 box office juggernaut There's Something About Mary, which scored nearly $370 million at the box office on a $23 million budget. Not to mention winning over both critics and audiences with its charmingly lowbrow gags.
In a world where The Hangover sparked two sequels, it's a wonder Mary never went on to headline a second film. But it turns out that could still feasably happen if the perfect idea struck. According to Bobby Farrelly:
Look, There’s Something About Mary. We love those characters so much that if we ever thought of a way to bring them back and retell a story using those characters again, we’d be up for it because we love the characters. If we weren’t passionately in love with those characters, we wouldn’t want to do a sequel.
So if anyone out there assumed that the lack of There's Something About Mary sequels is due to the filmmaker siblings not caring about the characters, put that worry to rest. It turns out that we technically could have had a second film at any point in the past 26 years, had one or both of the brothers conceived a narrative that would justify all the work that would go into getting the cast back together.
Of course, that's something of a tall order itself, though perhaps not quite as difficult now as it would have been even a decade ago. Since 2014, Cameron Diaz was more or less retired from acting, and only returned to Hollywood relatively recently for upcoming projects like the Jamie Foxx action comedy Back in Action and the animated sequel Shrek 5. Ben Stiller is also not as prolific a performer these days as he is a director and producer, though he still gets in front of the camera on occasion, and will be doing so for another long-awaited '90s comedy sequel, Happy Gilmore 2.
Whether or not we ever actually get to hang out with Ted and Mary again, with or without specially concocted hairgel products, at least we can still look back on the original and giggle between tugging awkwardly at our collars. And don't forget to check out Jack Black's devlishly fun performance as Satan in Paramount+'s Dear Santa, which is now streaming.
