The This is Spinal Tap director Rob Reiner has announced that Michael McKean, Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer will return for the sequel to the cult classic mockumentary.
Spinal Tap II will hit cinemas 40 years after the original film.
Rob Reiner, who will reprise his role as filmmaker Marty DiBergi, told Deadline that the new film will be released on 19 March, 2024.
“The plan is to do a sequel that comes out on the 40th anniversary of the original film and I can tell you hardly a day goes by without someone saying, why don’t you do another one?” said the director.
“For so many years, we said, ‘nah’. It wasn’t until we came up with the right idea how to do this. You don’t want to just do it, to do it. You want to honour the first one and push it a little further with the story.”
The original film was released to critical acclaim in 1984. And in 2002 the Library of Congress described it as “culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant” and it was selected for preservation by the National Film Registry.
Reiner gave some clues as to what the sequel will entail, saying that it will revolve around the band being due to play one last show.
“They’ve played Albert Hall, played Wembley Stadium, all over the country and in Europe. They haven’t spent any time together recently, and that became the premise,” said Reiner.
“The idea was that Ian Faith, who was their manager, he passed away. In reality, Tony Hendra [who played the manager in the first film] passed away [in 2021]. Ian’s widow inherited a contract that said Spinal Tap owed them one more concert. She was basically going to sue them if they didn’t. All these years and a lot of bad blood we’ll get into and they’re thrown back together and forced to deal with each other and play this concert.”
If you’ve never seen This Is Spinal Tap, you can watch it on BBC Two tomorrow (14 May) at 10.40pm or catch up on the iPlayer.
