There was almost a sequel to Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.
The 2006 NASCAR film poking fun at the sport and the culture around it is widely considered to be one of the best comedy films of all time. The all-star cast of Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly, Sacha Baron Cohen, Gary Cole, and Jane Lynch (and many more) brought a zany, stock-car-racing world to the big screen, and provided quotable moments that will likely stand the test of time.
Some for reference:
- “If you ain’t first, you’re last.”
- “I wanna go fast.”
- “Shake and bake!”
- “I don’t know what to do with my hands.”
- “I found a whole rat in my Cobb salad.”
That last one isn’t used as much as the others… but it’s one of my personal favorites. Simply put, Talladega Nights provides non-stop laughs, and it’s one of the more re-watchable movies out there. Oh, and I actually talk about the history of the world in pre-Talladega-Nights and post-Talladega-Nights terms… that’s how important and hilarious the comedy film is in my eyes.
And according to the co-writer and director of the racing comedy, Adam McKay, there was almost a Talladega Nights 2. In celebration of the film’s 20 year anniversary (crazy its already been two decades since Ricky Bobby was on the big screen), McKay shared with Business Insider that they worked out a storyline for a sequel after the first movie went bonkers at the box office:
“We did have an idea for ‘Talladega Nights 2.’ It was that Ricky Bobby was going to hook up with an F1 team, and he was going to race in Denmark or the Netherlands and feel like he’s in a communist country because they have nationalized healthcare. So, along with struggling with how fast those F1 cars go, he would have clashed with far-left-leaning Europe compared to America.”
Ricky Bobby in Formula 1? That would have been a hilarious fish out of water story to watch.
And it wasn’t like someone axed the film, or killed it before they could get it going. McKay says they chose not to do Talladega Nights 2 because… it was just going to be too much work. All of the sets for a racing movie are hard to arrange, schedule and/or build out. So McKay and Ferrell (this was long before they had their falling out around 2019) pivoted and casually created another iconic comedy:
“The only reason we didn’t do it was it’s a lot of work to shoot race car stuff. The reason we went and did ‘Step Brothers’ next was we felt like, can we just go do comedy in a house? We were tired after ‘Talladega Nights.’ It never got to the point where we wrote a treatment.”
Oh what could have been (though I suppose Step Brothers might not exist if Talladega Nights 2 did).
Here’s the thing… the Ricky Bobby-focused sequel could still work. F1 is much more popular in the United States than it was back in the late 2000s. One could make an argument that now would actually be the time to pull the trigger on the Talladega Nights sequel. McKay and Ferrell would have to put aside their differences and greivances to make it happen… but maybe reviving Ricky Bobby is exactly what it would take to bring the duo behind some of the best comedies of all time back together.
