The Big Picture

• There have been many attempts to get Wedding Crashers 2 off the ground, with a sequel idea involving Daniel Craig.
• HBO Max was at one time allegedly planning on the sequel.
• Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn's box office power has diminished since Wedding Crashers.

Comedy sequels are incredibly risky endeavors, but very common. Whether it’s Weekend at Bernie’s, The Hangover, Horrible Bosses, or even the Marlon Wayans/Adam Sandler comedy vehicle Bulletproof, if the first movie made money, it'll likely get a sequel. Given that Wedding Crashers, starring Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, was one of the biggest movies of 2005, one would imagine that a sequel to that feature would’ve been inevitable. Weirdly, this has yet to happen, but of course, Hollywood has made a valiant effort. The R-rated comedy remains, nearly two decades after its initial release, without a sequel. However, there have been several attempts to get another Wedding Crashers movie off the ground, including one from the early 2020s that got shockingly close to becoming a reality.

A 'Wedding Crashers' Sequel Wasn't a Priority

Initially, the biggest extension to the Wedding Crashers brand name came exclusively from a 2007 NBC reality show entitled The Real Wedding Crashers. It turned out watching real people crashing weddings wasn't as publicly appealing as watching comedic actors do staged wedding crashes. The program lasted only a few episodes and was quickly canned. Meanwhile, the primary creative team behind Wedding Crashers moved on to other projects. Director David Dobkin got invested in Fred Claus and The Change-Up, while Vaughn and Wilson had a slew of other comedic movies to anchor.

It didn’t help that Wedding Crashers came at a moment in time when comedy sequels weren’t exactly out of fashion, but they were slightly less common. While titles like Evan Almighty existed, typical comedy hits in the late 2000s merely spawned other original titles from the same creative team and leads. The 40-Year-Old Virgin made Knocked Up instead of a sequel to the former, while Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly, and director Adam McKay reunited for Step Brothers after Talladega Nights rather than just doing Talladega Nights 2. Then there were the works of Adam Sandler, which (pre-2013) didn’t involve sequels but rather oriignal premises, such as in 50 First Dates and Click. While the 2009 feature The Hangover would bring comedy sequels back into style, for a brief moment in the 2000s, it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that a lucrative comedy would spawn a franchise.

The 'Wedding Crashers' Team Wanted Daniel Craig for a Sequel

Thus, Wedding Crashers, for many years, wasn’t a priority. However, in 2014, Dobkin revealed on Quora that the creative team behind this feature once had a very specific idea for Wedding Crashers 2 involving Daniel Craig. This follow-up would’ve seen Craig playing an even more masterful crasher of weddings that Vaughn and Wilson’s characters would’ve had to contend with. This vision of the production never went forward, though, and it’s likely it never made it past being just a germ of an idea.

Even as plans for Wedding Crashers 2 stalled out as just concepts, Vaughn and Wilson kind of delivered a spiritual follow-up to the project in the form of the 2013 comedy The Internship. Arriving nearly a decade after Wedding Crashers, functioning as a feature-length ad for Google, and being rated PG-13 (in contrast to the R-moniker of Crashers), The Internship offered little of what people enjoyed from Wedding Crashers beyond the leading men. The box office failure of this title also signaled why Hollywood was likely hesitant to commission another Wedding Crashers installment. Vaughn and Wilson had never headlined another comedy as big as Wedding Crashers, with Vaughn especially being on a box office cold streak consisting of The Dilemma, The Watch, and Delivery Man at the dawn of the 2010s. Vaughn’s dwindling box office pull almost certainly gave Warner Bros. Pictures and New Line Cinema executives pause about pursuing further exploits in the Wedding Crashers universe.

'Wedding Crashers 2' Was Allegedly in the Works at HBO Max

In November 2016, Wedding Crashers leading lady Isla Fisher revealed that, over a decade after the original movie, a new Wedding Crashers installment was on the horizon. It was a very sudden development that suggested fans of the original movie were finally going to get the follow-up they’d always craved. By June 2020, though, Dobkin revealed that a script for Wedding Crashers 2 wasn't finalized, while also divulging that he and the first movie’s leading men had been constantly badgered about doing a follow-up over the years. Resistance over just repeating the first Wedding Crashers led to this sequel never going anywhere, though Dobkin considered making Wedding Crashers 2 about the original film's lead characters being single again in their late-40s.

This notion got Dobkin excited about making another Wedding Crashers movie, though the script for such a movie was still very much a work in progress. By June 2021, a Wedding Crashers 2 script had apparently been approved, but the feature had yet to receive a green light. A month later, Owen Wilson spoke optimistically about the production finally happening, while reports emerged suggesting that this sequel would be an HBO Max original movie. However, a few months later, it was revealed that Wedding Crashers 2 was dead in the water thanks to Wilson opting to sign on to star in The Haunted Mansion during the timeframe that Wedding Crashers 2 was originally set to shoot. With this development, there was no other timeframe in the near future where all the main actors of the original film (including Rachel McAdams, who was reportedly set to return for this sequel) would be available for Wedding Crashers 2.

With Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema eschewing streaming-exclusive movies in favor of theatrical releases and Hollywood in general being currently timid around R-rated comedies, it’s doubtful Wedding Crashers 2 will get revived anytime soon. Given the dismal track record of comedy movie sequels, that’s probably for the best.

Wedding Crashers is available to watch on Max in the U.S.

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