Do I need to move on? Do I need to stop clinging to the idea that 21 Jump Street, one of the unexpectedly funniest movies of the 2010s, will get a sequel in which Jenko (Channing Tatum) and Schmidt (Jonah Hill) take down an alien threat? Is it actually too much to ask in this hyper-bloated four-quadrant era where studios don’t make a ton of down-to-earth comedies?
Tatum, making the rounds for his new movie Roofman, says I am not alone in wondering when 23 Jump Street — proposed more than a decade ago as a crossover/reboot of the Men in Black franchise — will arrive on this planet. He gets asked the question often. But his latest answer doesn’t leave much room for hope.
“I don’t think it’ll ever happen,” Tatum told Variety. “The problem is the overhead. It would cost as much as the actual budget of the film — if not more — because of all the producers involved. It’s just too top-heavy. It falls over every time.”
Well… that sucks. The existence of 23 Jump Street–Men in Black was first revealed in the aftermath of Sony’s massive 2014 hack, when emails hacked and published online by a North Korean-backed group exposed early development plans. (All because of Seth Rogen’s movie The Interview!) By 2016, Variety confirmed the project was real and moving forward, with The Muppets director James Bobin in talks to take over for Jump Street directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller. Sony had even circled a production start date that summer. Hill, in leaked documents, called the idea “clean and rad and powerful,” which is just exceptional email prose.
22 Jump Street ended with a barrage of fake sequel trailers — Medical School, Cooking School, Dance Academy — but a Men in Black crossover would have topped them all. I feel this at my core. And to this day, Lord and Miller swear the screenplay was gold.
“There was a script that was very funny and very crazy that we really adored,” Miller said on the Happy Sad Confused podcast back in 2022. Lord recalled some of the bits, like that the black suits from Men in Black were treated like martial arts belts, and that Hill and Tatum would’ve been issued powder-blue suits as rookie agents. According to Miller, the premise was simply that while Jenko and Schmidt were in medical school, something happened that got them embroiled in the world of Men in Black, “and they had to team up to stop an alien takeover.”
Perfect. The pitch sounded like the perfect marriage of Lord and Miller’s meta-comedy style with the zany sci-fi energy of Men in Black. But by 2019, development fizzled out, and Sony took the Men in Black series in another direction: a reboot, Men in Black: International, starring Tessa Thompson and Chris Hemsworth. To quote ourselves in 2019, International was “the cinematic equivalent of being neuralyzed.” Based on the box office, audiences basically agreed.
Still, Tatum says the creative team hasn’t entirely given up on a 23 Jump Street. He, Hill, and directors Lord and Miller have all agreed to lower their producer fees to make another sequel possible. The real sticking point, he claims, is producer Neal H. Moritz’s “huge” compensation demand. “To be honest, that’s what’s killing it,” Tatum said. Shots fired.
It’s been more than a decade since 21 Jump Street and 22 Jump Street made over half a billion dollars combined. Maybe there’s no juice to a legacyquel at this point. But the promise of MIB 23 still sounds like one of the funniest movies we’ll never see. I’m holding space.
