When Will Ferrell and Adam McKay get together, they shoot a lot of material. As fans of “Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy” already know, there was so much leftover material from the making of the comedy, the flimmakers were able to stitch together an entirely new movie, “Wake Up, Ron Burgudy: The Lost Movie,” which was included as a DVD extra for the film. Now, they’ve pretty much done the same thing again.
Staring next Friday, February 28th the Channel 4 team is back in theaters with a super-sized, R-rated cut of “Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues.” So what will be different? Pretty much everything. “We started talking and realized, we can replace every single joke in the movie with another joke,” McKay told The New York Times. That’s exactly what they did, with this new cut boasting 763 new jokes (according to the trailer below) or about 95% new material, including a full blown musical number.
“Originally the movie was four hours long, and they played around with the idea of splitting it into two movies,” Will Ferrell said on “The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon” earlier this week. “But that didn’t really work so we just had a second editor working the whole time with alternative jokes. It’s the same movie, it’s 20 minutes longer, there’s a musical number we had to cut from the original one, little treats like that.”
But not to worry, if you don’t feel like shelling out for the new cut in theaters, it’ll also be on the home video release in April. Check out the trailer and clip below.