The Jump Street sequel fans have waited 12 years for is finally moving forward
The gangs getting back together
According to an initial report from Variety, Sony is moving forward with a third film in the Jump Street franchise, with Jonah Hill, Channing Tatum and Ice Cube all in talks to return.
Rodney Rothman, who worked on Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, is attached to direct from a script he co-wrote with Hill and Meghan Malloy. Franchise masterminds Phil Lord and Chris Miller are also returning as producers alongside long-time collaborator Neal H. Moritz.
It's been more than 12 years since 22 Jump Street landed in cinemas, which is either exciting news or a horrifying reminder of the passage of time, depending on your age. The original 21 Jump Street took a largely forgotten 1980s TV show and somehow turned it into one of the funniest studio comedies of the 2010s. Hill and Tatum played Schmidt and Jenko, two underachieving police officers sent undercover at a high school to investigate a drug ring, while Ice Cube stole scene after scene as their permanently furious boss Captain Dickson.
Against all odds, the sequel managed to pull off the rare feat of being every bit as good as the original. Shifting the action from high school to college, 22 Jump Street leaned even harder into the meta humour that made the first film such a hit, constantly poking fun at the idea that Hollywood was making an increasingly unnecessary sequel in the first place. Audiences clearly didn't mind. The first film grossed more than $200 million worldwide, while the sequel pushed that figure to $331 million.
The decision to jump straight to 24 Jump Street is actually part of a joke the franchise has been building towards for years. Fans will remember the now-iconic end credits sequence from 22 Jump Street, which imagined dozens of increasingly absurd future sequels. Schmidt and Jenko were shown going undercover at medical school, culinary school, dance school, flight school and eventually even in space. By the film's own logic, a version of 23 Jump Street has technically already happened.
For much of the last decade, a third film has felt like one of Hollywood's great "what ifs". There were plans for a crossover with Men in Black, while Tatum previously revealed that another abandoned version had what he called the best script he'd ever read for a third movie. None of those projects made it beyond development, leaving fans to assume the series had quietly run its course.
Now, though, it looks like Schmidt and Jenko could finally be heading back undercover. With Hill, Tatum and Ice Cube all reportedly in talks to return, and Lord and Miller back behind the scenes, 24 Jump Street has the ingredients to pull off something Hollywood rarely manages: a comedy sequel arriving more than a decade later that people are actually excited about.
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