While 2008's action-comedy Pineapple Express was a modest hit at the box office and a critical success, Seth Rogen says Sony turned down the chance for a sequel. Rogen admits that at one point they had plans to make Pineapple Express 2, but ultimately budget concerns meant the studio wasn't interested.
"We tired to make one," Rogen explained during an interview on The Howard Stern Show, per Deadline. "Thanks to the Sony hack, you can actually find the email when Sony decided to kill the movie and not make it. It was something we were very open to several years ago, but Sony was not that interested in it."
Directed by David Gordon Green (Vice Principals, the new Halloween flicks) and written by Rogen and Evan Goldberg, the original grossed over $100 million at the box office on a budget of around $25-26 million.
Judd Apatow was set to produce the sequel, as he did with the first, but the team was asking for a budget of around $50 million in 2014. As the Daily Beast reported in 2017 following the Sony email hack, the company wasn't willing to go any higher than $45 million for the budget.
"I think we probably wanted too much money," Rogen reiterated to Stern. "Studios, they don't like giving away money. Weird thing."
Talk of Pineapple Express 2 apparently died down shortly after, and unfortunately there hasn't been much indication that we'll get a sequel anytime soon.
