Vince Vaughn Wants to Do ‘Dodgeball 2’

In this age of legacyquels, no Hollywood property is ever truly “dead,” even after years or decades of inactivity. All it takes is a marketable title and a couple of stars willing to return to their beloved roles to get something off the ground.

Case in point: Justin Long, one of the stars of the surprise 2004 hit Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story says another of the film’s stars, Vince Vaughn “has a great idea” for a sequel — but in order for it to happen, he needs to convince a third member of the cast, Ben Stiller, to join the project.

Long explained all of this in an interview with ComicBook.com, saying that Vaughn approached him with the idea for a sequel while they were working on another project recently.

“Vince had been telling me that he has this great idea for a sequel,” Long said. “I don’t know if he had yet pitched it to Ben, but I kind of set up the pitch, I felt like I should facilitate the pitch.” Long added that he would “love to do it and I hope that it ends up happening, but I think Ben is a little … trepidatious about doing a sequel to something so beloved, something that people enjoy so much that.”

The original Dodgeball was a sendup of sports movies, with Long and Vaughn as two of the key members of a team of lovable losers who enter a dodgeball tournament in order to win the money they need to keep their gym out of the hands of evil businessman White Goodman (Stiller). Why would gym employees enter a dodgeball competition to raise money to pay the rent on a gym? Because it’s a movie, that’s why. Made on a budget of around $20 million, Dodgeball wound up grossing about eight times that, and those numbers are before factoring in home video sales and assorted other rights.

The Dodgeball cast has reunited in the past for charity events, and there was some talk of a sequel about ten years ago, but nothing ever of it. In the interim since the original movie, Hollywood has rapidly decreased the number of comedies they produce, and Stiller himself has almost completely transitioned out of acting and into writing and directing, working on shows like Escape at Dannemora and the Apple TV+ hit Severance. So if a Dodgeball sequel hinges on his involvement, that’s a mighty big if.