Adam McKay Offers Brief Anchorman 2 Details
Posted 04.23.12 by Ryan
Ever since Will Ferrell appeared as Ron Burgundy on Conan last month to announce that Anchorman 2 was officially in the works, fans have wondered what will happen next for San Diego's Action4 News team. Earlier this month, Anchorman co-writer and director Adam McKay revealed sparse details about the sequel, saying that a "custody battle" and "bowling for dollars" might be included in some way in Anchorman 2.
Considering the original movie, McKay's comments could be taken as either fact or a joke. Then again, McKay said he and Ferrell were still about a week away from starting the writing process, so anything he said could have been true for the moment. In an interview with Empire, McKay revealed that he and Ferrell have started writing the script and have about "half a percent" to "2 percent" finished.
We've got five pages of story notes and chunks of story. We're holing up writing for the next three months.
As for what those "story notes" contain, McKay says to expect that the news team will have to deal with even more change, something "these guys never deal well with."
We know these guys never deal well with change, and the good thing is that there's a big blast of change coming, according to the regular timeline. We're going to be throwing a lot of innovation at them, and they're not going to handle it well. It's right when all the news started changing with the 24-hours news cycle in '78 or '79. All of a sudden, local news stations diversified and had Latino anchors and African-American anchors, and any time you're talking about diversity and the Action News team, that's always fun to deal with.
The Anchorman 2 story is surprisingly faithful to the original movie, considering that McKay teased in 2010 that a potential Anchorman 2 would be set in the 1980s and that there's this "other, bigger, crazier idea that's really more what it's about." The original movie detailed how the Action News Team (Ferrell, Paul Rudd, David Koechner, and Steve Carell) dealt with the network-induced addition of female anchorperson Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate), so the addition of race seems like a logical next step for the sequel. Perhaps the "crazier" ideas have yet to be revealed, perhaps in yet another news team gang fight. "We already have a couple of ideas for it," McKay admitted.