It’s safe to say that David Spade‘s 2001 comedy Joe Dirt is not a “good” movie. But that’s never stopped a movie from developing a faithful fan following after its release, usually on home video, and Spade’s simpleton redneck character certainly has one.

The movie made almost $31 million worldwide on a $17.7 million budget, so, paired with said home video success and faithful fan following, it should come as no surprise that a Joe Dirt 2 is being worked on. Doing an AMA on Reddit, Spade was asked about the potential sequel and explained where things stood. He also revealed that, if the movie is made, it could actually be free-to-watch from the start.

Continue below to see what he had to say.

First Spade was asked about Joe Dirt and working with the likes of Christopher Walken and Kid Rock, which led to his revealing that he’s been working on a sequel and, even more surprisingly, that it could debut on the free-to-watch streaming service Crackle:

Thank you, first of all, because I loved the Joe Dirt movie also. It’s the one I hear about the most, right behind Tommy Boy. I grew up in Arizona, and the co-writer, Fred Wolf, grew up in Montana, and we’d see guys like that all the time. Shirts off, carrying gas cans, questionable life, never knew where they were going or coming from, and I grew up with my brother Harry, a cage of rattlesnakes in his room, and guns, and craziness, in a small copper-mining town outside of Scottsdale, AZ.

So I lived a lot of this stuff, and think it’s really interesting, and funny. We wrote a sequel, and we may wind up doing it on Crackle.com, because they want to be the first web address to do a sequel to a movie. Because Sony owns them, and it’s a Sony movie. We’re trying to find a way to make it for the budget, but we really want to do it. And keep it good.

I would ask Christopher Walken and Kid Rock to be in it again. And to take less money, if at all possible, than the amount they took the first time.

Christopher Walken was great, and he always had funny things to say. He worked on a movie called MOUSE TRAP and explained how it’s different working with an actor dog than an actor mouse. It was one of the best conversations I’ve ever been involved with. And Kid Rock was my idea and I didn’t know him, so we called him out of the blue, and he liked Tommy Boy enough to take a leap of faith and do this. He’s very cool, and he’s actually a very nice guy, which no one would believe, especially me. But he’s one of my few showbiz buddies that I still talk to a lot.

When asked more specifically if Joe Dirt 2 was happening, Spade said:

Well, I was trying to answer that earlier, we’re putting it together now and seeing if we can keep it as funny and with the music we like for a lower budget. All the movies you hear about being made now keep running into budget problems, this and that, and it sounds boring, but it’s just a new world, where they can’t make those $15-30 million comedies anymore. It’s either $3 million or $200 million, there’s almost no in-between, so everyone’s adjusting to either a summer tentpole Avengers-type movie, or learning to get down and dirty and gritty and making a smaller movie. I just don’t want to burn the fans and want to make it good, so me and the other writer are combing through the sequel and trying to make it make sense and have good music and be funny within the parameters. So hopefully it will be soon, or it will be too pointless.

Other things Spade discuss during the AMA include Chris Farley, The Emperor’s New Groove, and sequels like Hotel Transylvania 2 and Grown Ups 3. You can read about all of them over at Reddit.

It’d be interesting to see a sequel of any kind of significance first released on a site like Crackle instead of straight-to-video or via VOD services. Whether it would work favorably for the studio somehow, that’s to be seen. And it will be especially tricky to make a sequel to a movie that cost over $17 million 13 years ago, and do it for significantly less coin.

So, clearly, Spade still has plenty of work to do before we know whether or not Joe Dirt 2 will really happen or not. But the fact that it is looking pretty possible should excite fans.

Would you be interested in a sequel to Joe Dirt?

[Source: via CinemaBlend]