Alicia Silverstone Reuniting With Brendan Fraser For A Sequel No One Wants?
Alicia Silverstone and Brendan Fraser starred in 1999's Blast from the Past, and now, Silverstone wants to get back with Fraser and make a follow-up to the critically derided and barely profitable rom-com.
The 90s are back, and we are excited to see Alicia Silverstone and Brendan Fraser stepping back into the limelight. Variety reports that, unfortunately, Silverstone wants to work with Fraser again to bring back the barely profitable and critically derided film, Blast from the Past. Amazingly, the stars of Clueless and George of the Jungle combined for a middling romantic comedy that barely made a profit, but they did, and now it might be coming back.
Released in 1999, Blast from the Past starred Fraser as Adam Webber, a 35-year-old man who grew up in his father’s (Christopher Walken) fallout shelter on a steady diet of 1950s pop culture. Unaware of anything related to the present day, Adam comes across Eve (Alicia Silverstone) and takes her up on a $ 1,000-a-week offer to help him find a non-mutant wife. After a series of misunderstandings, including Adam being worshipped by a cult, everything gets resolved in a feel-good ending that seemingly leaves no room for a sequel.
That didn’t stop Silverstone from responding to a fan question at 90s Con in Connecticut regarding revisiting the film “With Brendan? I would do anything with Brendan. It was so much fun.” The two stars even crossed paths recently, with the PETA spokesperson explaining, “I just saw Brendan after he won his Oscar and he’s so cute. He talked in his speech about how we all go through this really hard time and you have to grow and it’s part of life that you struggle and then look what happened to him.”
While it would be fun for fans to see the two stars back on screen together again for the first time in nearly 25 years, hopefully, it will be with a different project. The podcast Genre Vision recently compared Blast from the Past to a similar fish-out-of-water movie, Bubble Boy, featuring a strange love connection starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Marley Shelton. In the latter film, Gyllenhaal’s character Jimmy Livingston is forced to live in a plastic bubble, exposed only to Highlights magazine and Land of the Lost, mirroring Fraser’s character raised in isolation.
While both films would be hard sells today, especially as PG-13 comedies poking fun at nostalgia for a previous era, they’re each a product of turn-of-the-century Hollywood. If remade today, Blast from the Past could lean more heavily into the differences between now and the early 60s, which is briefly touched on when Adam first emerges, sees cross-dressers, and refers to them as “mutants.” If the concept is taken further and examined, the impact a parent’s worldview can have on someone, it could be something worth making today, but as a rom-com, it would be a disaster.
Blast from the Past has a few interesting twists, including the third-act involvement of the government, along with a decent cast of known character actors featuring Sissy Spacek, Christopher Walken, Nathan Fillion, David Foley, Joey Slotnick, and Dale Raoul. Yet despite the unexpected directions the fairly straightforward story decides to take at the last moment, in 2023, trying to tell a similar story would be exceedingly difficult.
Alicia Silverstone recently starred in Rebel Wilson‘s Netflix comedy Senior Year, while Brendan Fraser’s comeback was capped off with an Oscar win for Best Actor in The Whale. Individually, both are fantastic performers with amazing charisma, but together, we can only hope that they don’t go back to Blast from the Past. A romantic comedy would be great, but here’s hoping for a concept worthy of their talents.
