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It’s hard to imagine anything negative alongside thoughts of Will Ferrell‘s excessively exuberant Buddy from 2003’s Elf, but that’s what you’re going to have to do if you want to keep scrolling, so be warned.
According to a report from the Daily Mail, things were quite dramatic behind-the-scenes of the hit holiday comedy—in multiple ways. In addition to casting issues—the twin boys originally cast as baby Buddy had to be replaced and, apparently, Jim Carey was the original first choice for the lead role—there was also reportedly an on-set feud that contributed to Elf‘s fate as a solo movie without any sequels.
James Caan, who played Buddy’s straight-laced human dad, Walter Hobbs in the movie, revealed in a 2020 radio interview that Ferrell and Elf director Jon Favreau “didn’t get along” while making the movie and that their strained relationship played a big role in the fact that Elf never got a sequel.
“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.”
Of course, there are multiple sides to every story and, while Caan pointed to a potential feud between Ferrell and Favreau as the reason we never got an Elf 2, Ferrell has also been asked about why the movie never got a sequel and he had a different answer.
In 2021, the comedian confirmed Caan’s claim that an Elf sequel had, at one point, been in the works when he told The Hollywood Reporter that he turned down $29 million to make what would have been the second movie in the series because of issues with the script, which he thought just “rehashed” the story from the original movie.
“I would have had to promote the movie from an honest place, which would’ve been, like, ‘Oh no, it’s not good. I just couldn’t turn down that much money,'” he said at the time. “And I thought, ‘Can I actually say those words? I don’t think I can, so I guess I can’t do the movie.’”
Ferrell had previously shut down the idea of a sequel happening in 2013 during an appearance on Watch What Happens Live when he told Andy Cohen he would “absolutely not” be doing an Elf sequel.
“It would look slightly pathetic if I tried to squeeze back into the ‘Elf’ tights,” he said at the time (per USA Today).
So, feel free to make a big bowl of syrup- and candy-covered pasta and drown your sorrows in sugar and carbs if you need to, because it sounds like Elf 2 is definitely never, ever happening.
