Time to give up hope for that Jon Hamm Fletch sequel
Director Greg Mottola has made it clear that he and Jon Hamm won't be moving forward on a sequel to 2022's (very fun) flop Confess, Fletch
Screenshot: YouTube
2022’s Confess, Fletch seems to be doomed to be the kind of movie people are going to be perpetually irritating about. And we include ourselves in our number: There’s just something about the movie—which is funny, quick, and centered by a fantastic Jon Hamm performance, buoyed by an amazing supporting cast—that generates sentences like, “C’mon, you haven’t seen Confess, Fletch? It’s the kind of mid-cost, stylish comedy movie nobody makes anymore! C’mon!”
This is not a problem that has any likelihood of afflicting the movie’s potential sequel, though. (Which director Greg Mottola had said he had already been tapped to write around the time the first movie disastrously slumped its way onto video on demand, after an easily missed theatrical release). Because, uh, it’s not getting made.
This is per THR, reporting on comments Mottola made this week on social media, with the Superbad director writing that “I’ve been rather depressed about it.” Not wholly surprising, in that Mottola and Hamm both treated Confess, Fletch like the passion project it absolutely was, including both men giving back parts of their paychecks to fund three more days of filming on the movie. Mottola might have been banking on a mixture of goodwill and the first film’s critical regard to get the second movie made, but no dice. “I was told ‘the first one lost money’ — as if there had been any attempt to make money,” he noted wryly, stating that his previous greenlight for a second movie evaporated with a switch out of executives at Miramax. “I got caught in the changing of the guard, and my comedy is too dry and unsentimental for the new masters,” Mottola wrote.
Hamm previously talked about the murky future for the potential franchise, based on the books by Gregory Mcdonald, calling efforts to make any more of them “hard.” “The movie didn’t break records at the box office,” Hamm said last month amidst his current Fargo Emmy push. “Not that that means anything.” (Note to readers: It may mean something.)