News Team, assssssemble...on Broadway?! While speaking with Entertainment Weekly, Will Ferrell revealed that back when prospects of an actual Anchorman sequel were slim, he and collaborator/director Adam McKay were seriously considering taking the new adventures of Ron Burgundy to the stage.
“We thought we could kind of do the old Marx Brothers model where we perfected it onstage for six months, got all the jokes tight, and then we shot it,” McKay told EW. The studio seemed open to the notion, and all the other castmembers were onboard." David Koechner (Champ Kind) clarified: "We were going to rehearse in the spring and run all summer, and that fall we were going to shoot the new movie. I was very excited.”
So what happened? Basically Ferrell and McKay realized they were theater newbs, and greatly underestimated what it would take to get such an endeavor off the ground. "We had dinner with Josh Gad once, and I was asking him about The Book of Mormon. “I said, ‘I’m just curious: How long did it take for you guys to put that together?’ And he was like, ‘Well, we workshopped it for four years … ‘ We had no real idea how much work it takes to mount a musical.”
Of course now, we're getting a true-blue sequel this Christmas, so all's well that ends well. But this could've been an epically grand affair, especially when plans lke a rotating cast (Alec Baldwin as Ron Burgundy?!) were being tossed around.
RELATED: Anchorman 2 Trailer
[via EW]
