Sequels to big, dumb, beloved comedies are almost always a bad idea: inevitably disappointing, rarely capturing the magic of the original, often seemingly like a desperate cash grab. (See: Blues Brothers 2000, Caddyshack II, etc.) But Ben Stiller must’ve thought he was exempt when he took a stab at a second Zoolander. “I thought everybody wanted this,” he reflected on an episode of David Duchovny’s upcoming podcast Fail Better (via People). “And then it’s like, ‘Wow, I must have really fucked this up. Everybody didn’t go to it. And it’s gotten these horrible reviews.’”
He explained to Duchovny (who appeared in Zoolander), “It really freaked me out because I was like, ‘I didn’t know was that bad?’ What scared me the most on that one was I’m losing what I think what’s funny, the questioning yourself … on Zoolander 2, it was definitely blindsiding to me. And it definitely affected me for a long time.”
No wonder Stiller was so “trepidatious,” as Justin Long put it, about signing on for a Dodgeball sequel. (Vince Vaughn’s pitch for Dodgeball 2 is moving forward, but so far Stiller doesn’t seem to be involved.) But the actor-director now sees a silver lining to the Zoolander 2 flop. “The wonderful thing that came out of that for me was just having space where, if that had been a hit, and they said ‘Make Zoolander 3 right now,’ or offered some other movie, I would have just probably jumped in and done that,” he said on the pod. “But I had this space to kind of sit with myself and have to deal with it and other projects that I had been working on—not comedies, some of them—I have the time to actually just work on and develop.”
Stiller “probably could have figured out something to do” if he had been commissioned to make another comedy, “But I just didn’t want to,” he said, admitting that he felt “hurt” by the failure of Zoolander 2. Instead, he shifted focus to television, going on to produce and direct the award-winning series Escape At Dannemora and Severance. “Finding yourself in terms of what creatively you want to be and do, [I] always loved directing. I always loved making movies. I always, in my mind, loved the idea of just directing movies [since] I was a kid, and not necessarily comedies,” he said. “And so, over the course of the next like, nine or 10 months, I was able to develop these limited series.”