Left feeling a little sad and unfulfilled at the end of Hamlet? Well, don’t worry. Focus Features and Steve Coogan will be coming to your rescue, now that Focus has picked up Hamlet 2 at Sundance. Variety reports that Focus won the first real bidding war of the festival, competing against several other companies and finally purchasing the film for a whopping $10 million.
Kelly saw the movie at Sundance and has a review, calling it “a gut-buster.” Coogan stars as David Marschz, a failed actor who moves to Tucson and takes over a high school drama department. When budget cuts threaten to close the whole program down, he decides to stage a play that will revive the community’s interest in drama. Figuring that Hamlet is popular enough, he comes up with the sequel, Hamlet 2, which apparently involves a time-travel machine and other dead famous people but is not Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
Catherine Kenner also stars as Marschz’s wife, with David Arquette as an odd boarder, Amy Poehler as an ACLU lawyer, and Elisabeth Shue as herself. They all become part of Marschz’s strange journey, which also involves dealing with a bunch of uninterested teenage actors as well as the two legitimate “drama geeks” who are in the play.
Hamlet 2 was one of the first major purchases of Sundance, and by all reports was a total crowd pleaser. This is the festival that launched Little Miss Sunshine, after all, so expect some major promotion down the line for this silly comedy.
