Superbad 2 Should Be All Female, Says McLovin
Christopher Mintz-Plasse, who played McLovin in Superbad, has said that if there was a Superbad 2, it should feature a female lead cast.
Christopher Mintz-Plasse, the actor who played McLovin in the classic teen comedy Superbad has said in a recent interview that if there were ever to be a Superbad 2, it would have to star a female cast.
While that’s an interesting idea, that’s not likely to be a popular suggestion. For one thing, the creators of Superbad have said they don’t want to do a sequel. For another thing, while there is definitely room for more comedies starring women, recent gender-flipped movies like Ghostbusters have not gone over well with audiences. However, it’s unclear if Christopher Mintz-Plasse’s idea for Superbad 2 would be a direct sequel with new female characters, or would almost be a remake of sorts.
In Superbad, McLovin was tasked with getting alcohol for a party using his fake ID. Instead of getting the alcohol and going to the party with his two friends, Seth and Evan – played by Jonah Hill and Michael Cera – he wound up hanging out with two police officers he thought were convinced he was an adult named McLovin. He spends the movie hanging out with these police officers – played by Bill Hader and Seth Rogen – getting drunk, shooting guns, and eventually blowing up a car. A Superbad 2 story that brings back the innocent nerd known as McLovin could easily be hilarious.
While there are teen comedies that center on young women, they don’t generally have the same type of humor that comes from a script written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. Raunchy comedies like Superbad get compared to a lot of movies from the 1980s and The Girl Next Door, which was popular, but nowhere near as well-known as Superbad. While there have been some attempts to make raunchier teen comedies starring female characters, like 2019’s Booksmart, none have taken off the way a Superbad 2 would with a female cast.
There are a lot of opinions on what’s happening with women and comedies in Hollywood. If we’re going to start seeing funnier movies starring women, we probably need more women writing the scripts. That doesn’t sound like a job for Superbad 2, but since Seth Rogen has said he doesn’t want to make a sequel to Superbad, it seems likely that a theoretical sequel would probably be written by women. But Seth Rogen isn’t wrong when he says that the idea of Superbad 2 seems like a way to mess with the legacy of his first film.
Seth Rogen and his best friend Evan Goldberg began writing Superbad when they were 13 years old. They had official meetings during their high school lunch breaks where they went over their early scripts. Eventually, Seth Rogen was on Freaks and Geeks, which introduced him to Judd Apatow, the guy responsible for movies like 40-Year-Old Virgin. Apatow even gave Rogen one of his first writing jobs working on the Fox series, Undeclared.
Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, and Judd Apatow had meetings where they pitched Superbad, and at first, Seth Rogen was meant to play one of the main characters, but aged out of the role by the time the film got going. But considering that this was a passion project for Rogen and Goldberg for so long, it’s no surprise they don’t want to spoil it with a Superbad 2.
In the end, the comedy was made on $20 million and earned $170 million at the box office. It’s no surprise that over a decade later, people are still talking about the possibility of seeing Superbad 2. It’s also no surprise that the filmmakers would rather not mess with the legacy of an early success they fought so hard for.
