The sequel to Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap was announced last year, and intended for release in 2024 to coincide with the original film’s 40th anniversary. Unfortunately, the actors’ strike delayed the start of the film, so it may not make that deadline. However, “We’re going to start shooting in the end of February and everybody is back,” Reiner said in a new interview on the RHLSTP With Richard Herring podcast.
“Everybody” is Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer, the members of the titular, fictional band. They’re not the only ones who are in: “Paul McCartney is joining us, and Elton John. And a few other surprises, Garth Brooks,” Reiner teased. Reiner will also reprise his role as the fictional filmmaker Marty DiBergi. The director previously told NME, “Marty DiBergi was roundly criticized by the band members for having done a hatchet job, [but] he’s going to be doing the second film.” As to what Marty’s been up to in the intervening years, Reiner explained, “Marty has not been that successful [since]. I think he made Kramer vs Kramer vs Godzilla, which didn’t do very well. It was a threesome, and they were all in love… and, unfortunately, Godzilla crushed the other two, so it didn’t work.”
As for the real film (not the film-within-a-film), Reiner shared with NME, “We never thought we would do a sequel. It was only because we started to talk to each other and we came up with an idea we think might work – we don’t know it will. We’re going to try. The bar is incredibly high. We debated whether or not we should do it… I said, ‘Look at us, we’re all in our 70s. How much time are we going to have [left] to have some fun?’”
And if people don’t “get” the Spinal Tap sequel, well, they didn’t really “get” Spinal Tap at first, either. “When we first previewed it, we previewed it in a theater in Dallas, Texas, and people … they didn’t know what the heck they were looking at,” Reiner recalled on the podcast. “They came up to me afterward and said, ‘I don’t understand. Why would you make a movie about a band that nobody’s ever heard of? And they’re so bad! Why would you do that?’ … They said, ‘You should make a movie about the Beatles or the Rolling Stones.’” And now all these years later, the Spinal Tap sequel will have an actual Beatle in it—who’d’ve thunk!