This is the trap with sequels and franchises: it’s very easy to rail against them, to decry filmmakers’ reliance on previous works as indicative of the industry’s odious lack of originality, until someone announces a sequel to a movie you really liked. And then you have to get excited without sounding like some kind of a hypocrite.
Ah, well, you only live once. In an interview with The Seattle Times (flagged by The AV Club) to promote his new film People Places Things , Jemaine Clement revealed his upcoming Flight of the Conchords tour isn’t the only reunion project on his plate. In a little throwaway parenthetical, the Times writes of the uproarious, Clement-fronted vampire mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows , “A sequel, to star the control-freak werewolf played by Rhys Darby — manager Murray from Flight of the Conchords — is in the planning stages.”
Shadows is the kind of movie we’d like to see more of, simply because it’s so fresh and funny, while recognizing that going back to the well could easily rob the premise of the surprise element that made the original work so well. So this is a pretty smart approach—the werewolves were only in a couple of scenes in the original (making this sound more like a spin-off than a sequel, if we can argue semantics for a moment), meaning a follow-up could delve deeper into their mythology without wearing out the first film’s welcome.
Or maybe it was just something Jemaine tossed off in an interview and we’re making way too big a deal of. Either way, if you somehow still haven’t seen What We Do in the Shadows, this is a good excuse to get on that.