Just a couple months after Seth McFarlane's hints about a release date back in August, Ted 2 has officially found its place on the release calendar. Universal Pictures has announced today, via Box Office Mojo, that they will be getting the R-rated comedy sequel into theaters on June 26, 2015.
As we've been talking about for a while now, the summer season of 2015 is absolutely jam packed with giant movies, from Joss Whedon's The Avengers: Age of Ultron to Zack Snyder's Batman vs. Superman, but as it stands Ted 2 doesn't currently have any direct competition on its release weekend. That said, it's surrounded on all sides by some pretty big films. Both the video game adaptation Assassin's Creed with Michael Fassbender and Pixar's Inside Out are set to debut one week before the Ted sequel, and one week later the comedy will going head-to-head against Alan Taylor's Terminator reboot.Three out of those four movies will be heavily targeting the exact same demographics, so it will be interesting to see how it turns out.
This is now the fourth big movie that Universal has set up for 2015. While the first five months of the calendar are empty for the studio, June 2015 will feature both Ted 2 and Jurassic World; July will see the release of the Despicable Me spin-off Minions, and then, as was announced earlier this week, they will have Duncan Jones' Warcraft set to be in theaters in December. There will obviously be many more films released by Universal that year, but they are definitely off to a good start.
Mark Wahlberg, who is attached to reprise his role as Bostonian John Bennett in the movie, has said that production on the sequel is looking to begin at the start of next summer, but we still don't know anything about the plot. McFarlane is coming back to direct and is co-writing the script with Alec Sulkin and Wellesley Wild, who not only both worked on the screenplay for the first Ted but also partnered with McFarlane on Family Guy. Outside of its two leads it's unclear right now who else among the cast of the first one will be coming back.
For those of you who are looking for a McFarlane feature fix before 2015, you're in luck. A Million Ways to Die in the West, the director's sophomore live-action movie, will be in theaters on May 30, 2014, and will have McFarlane starring in his first live-action lead role. He is joined by an all-star cast that includes Charlize Theron, Liam Neeson, Amanda Seyfried, Sarah Silverman, Giovanni Ribisi and Neil Patrick Harris.
