When the question of why a fan-favorite movie doesn’t get a sequel comes up, the answers are usually pretty ambiguous: Stuff like time commitments, or not finding the best possible idea, or just general “Hey, I don’t know, it’s a crazy business.” This is not the case with the third 21 Jump Street movie, especially if you ask Channing Tatum. Tatum knows exactly who to blame for the movie not getting made: Franchise producer Neil H. Moritz.
Tatum namechecked Moritz—a prolific producer with more than 100 film and TV credits to his name, including Sonic The Hedgehog, The Boys, and the Fast And Furious franchise—while talking about the very blunt reason that he thinks 23 Jump Street will never happen, despite having “sincerely the best script I’ve ever read for me and Jonah [Hill].”
“I get asked more about Jump Street 3 than any other movie on the face of the planet that I’ve ever done,” Tatum said in a Variety interview connected to his new film Roofman. “I don’t think it’ll ever happen. The problem is the overhead. It would cost as much as the actual budget of the film—if not more—because of all the producers involved. It’s just too top-heavy. It falls over every time.” Tatum went on to note that while he, Jonah Hill, Phil Lord, and Chris Miller have all agreed to take smaller producer fees to get the movie made, “Neal’s price for a producer fee is huge. And to be honest, that’s what’s killing it.”
Which is a pretty surprising bit of name-and-shaming, even if we can kind of understand Tatum’s frustration. (The Jump Street films weren’t just well-liked when they came out in 2012 and 2014; they were also highly lucrative, bringing in $200 and $330 million respectively—ridiculously high numbers for studio comedies.) You could argue that 22 Jump Street‘s ending—where it pitches a series of increasingly ridiculous sequels for itself—capped the franchise decently well, but, like, this is the guy who spent a decade vision-boarding himself as a live-action Gambit into existence; he doesn’t give up projects he likes easily.
