Late last year, we noted that franchise star Channing Tatum was starting to express some pretty public frustrations at the inability of his and Jonah Hill’s Jump Street series of cop comedies to get a third installment—going so far, at the time, to publicly name series producer Neal H. Moritz as the stopping block in getting another movie made. (Tatum claimed, in an interview to Variety, that he, Hill, and original directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller had all agreed to take pay cuts to get a second sequel produced, but Moritz refused to follow suit.) Now, in a shining reminder that, sometimes, bullying works, Deadline reports that a new installment of the series has officially been put into development at Sony—even if the studio did, apparently, feel like it needed to hop right over 23 Jump Street to get it done.
Because the film that’s now been put into development is apparently 24 Jump Street, with no immediate explanation given for the break in naming convention. (Unless, of course, producers were just really enamored of the “steaming load of Bolshevik” tagline someone came up with for the fake version of the sequel from 22 Jump Street‘s energetically parodic end credits sequence.) The upshot, though, is that Hill, Tatum, and Ice Cube are all now in talks to come back for the film, which will be directed by Rodney Rothman, a long-time Lord and Miller collaborator who was one of three credited directors on the duo’s Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse. Rothman reportedly co-wrote the script with Hill and Meghan Malloy, while Lord, Miller, and Moritz will produce.
The Jump Street movies were—by the admittedly lax standards of modern studio comedies—pretty ridiculous hits, with the 2014 sequel managing to make more than $300 million off of a roughly $80 million budget. Despite that, the franchise apparently stalled out afterwards, both over the aforementioned financial issues, and also (presumably) Lord and Miller getting ridiculously busy right around that period. Tatum previously expressed doubts about whether there was still blood left in this particular film franchise stone, but has apparently turned around on the idea now that the sequel is more than a decade old.
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