Film history is full of titles that didn't make a big splash upon release, only to grow their audience over the years to become cult classics. One such film is 2002's Super Troopers. A decade and a half after it made a measly $7 million dollars over a President's Day weekend, it seems like a lot of people have seen the film and can at least quote a few lines. Now that growing fandom is directly responsible for the upcoming sequel. Super Troopers 2 is finally arriving on the most appropriate of dates, 4/20, but the road to get there was not an easy one, particularly because of the start-and-stop approach they had to take with filming.
It was a few years back when Broken Lizard member and Super Troopers director Jay Chandrasekhar announced that the long-awaited sequel film was finally in the works, and that the group would be crowd-funding it. Broken Lizard was unable to get funding because the studios weren't convinced that the fans were out there ,so this was the only way the film could be made. However the Broken Lizard guys were also unsure that the fans were out there and that they'd want to contribute to making the movie, so when they launched the IndieGogo campaign, the goal was only to raise $2 million. Even though they wound up raising much more than that, the low-ball goal resulted in an insane production, as Broken Lizard member Paul Soter explained:
It's funny because there's this celebration of like, 'Oh wow, yeah. They're out there. They stepped up. We got this money.' Followed by the inevitable like, 'Gah, why didn't we set the bar higher because then we could have gotten all the money,' because we still had to go out and raise money, and that still took forever. You have to... what I didn't understand at the time is you don't spend that money within the calendar year, you get killed on all these taxes. So we had to go out and start shooting the movie without having the money to make the movie. So we went and shot for a week... then had to go raise the rest of the money and then go back. And that's just a bizarre way to do things too... so everything about how this movie was made was different than anything we'd ever done.
That is definitely not an ideal way to shoot a movie. As Paul Soter told Collider, they should have set the bar higher, but there was no way to know for sure that the IndieGogo campaign would succeed. And if the bar were set too high, who knows if fans would have responded in the way that they did. The constant starting and stopping to raise more money could not have been easy, but it just shows what a labor of love this sequel is. Although I'm sure it had to be frustrating to have the campaign succeed so wildly, only to have to go out and raise more money. It seems there were also some financial aspects to the crowd-funding that made things tricky as well. Using crowd-funding to finance a film is still a relatively new thing, and it carries its own challenges that you may not even know to prepare for.
I hope Super Troopers 2 succeeds despite the haphazard way in which it was filmed. Challenging productions can sometimes result in the most amazing of films, and it would be great for all the fans who contributed to be rewarded with another comedy classic. The trailers look hilarious and promise the kind of shenanigans we expect from the Vermont Highway Patrol. This time, the returning cast is joined by Emmanuelle Chriqui and Rob Lowe. Perhaps if this film succeeds, we can even get a Beerfest 2, which Broken Lizard says is still a possibility.
Super Troopers 2 finally arrives in theaters on April 20. To see all the movies hitting theaters this year, check out our release guide, and for all the latest on why you should always ask for more than you need, stay tuned to CinemaBlend.
