“Elf 2” nearly came to life, but tensions between Will Ferrell and director Jon Favreau ultimately shut it down.
Ferrell reportedly walked away from a $29 million offer for the sequel because he felt the script simply repeated the original film’s storyline, The Daily Mail reported.
Favreau is the filmmaker behind “Iron Man,” “The Jungle Book,” and creator of “The Mandalorian,” as well as the actor who plays Happy Hogan in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He was said to be clashing creatively with the “Saturday Night Live” alum, making a follow-up to the holiday classic impossible.
The 2003 “Elf” was an instant holiday classic.The film follows Buddy, a human raised among Santa’s elves who piles sugar onto every meal and eventually travels to New York to reconnect with his biological father, Walter Hobbs, a children’s book publishing executive at Greenway Press, portrayed by the late James Caan.
Speaking of Caan, he shed some light on the sequel drama in a radio interview in 2020.
“We were gonna do it and I thought, ‘Oh my god, I finally got a franchise movie, I could make some money, let my kids do what the hell they want to do.’ And the director and Will didn’t get along very well,” Caan said in an interview on Cleveland’s 92.3 The Fan’s “Bull & Fox” show. “So, Will wanted to do it, he didn’t want the director, and he had it in his contract; it was one of those things.”
Caan passed away on July 6, 2022, which would complicate any plans for a possible “Elf 2,” as one of the film’s key co-stars was gone.
The movie, full of cheer, magic, hijinks, and Christmas joy in New York City could have been a successful sequel. Its predecessor, “Elf” made $231 million worldwide with a production budget of $32 million, according to The Numbers.
Regardless of the beef or the script’s direction, the major critical and commercial success of the New Line Cinema film led to a 2010 Broadway musical, “Elf: The Musical,” and NBC’s 2014 stop-motion animated television special, “Elf: Buddy’s Musical Christmas.”
To this day, fans of the beloved Christmas movie still have their hopes up for a sequel, as Dexerto reported on a hoax announcement that gained traction on Facebook.
The post, the featuring a generated movie poster claiming the movie was coming in November 2025, garnered thousands of likes.