When The Bad Guys 2, the sequel to DreamWorks’ hyperkinetic, stylish 2022 animated heist picture The Bad Guys, hits theaters on Aug. 1, adult viewers will immediately make a connection that goes over most kids’ heads. Once again, the stars of the film — drawn from Aaron Blabley’s bestselling illustrated children’s series — are Mr. Wolf (Sam Rockwell), Mr. Snake (Marc Maron), Mr. Shark (Craig Robinson), Mr. Piranha (Anthony Ramos), and Ms. Tarantula (Awkwafina), a team of criminal masterminds who rehabilitated themselves in the first movie, only to return to crime for One Last Heist. But this time, their target is Elon Musk.
He isn’t called that, of course. But Mr. Moon (voiced by Colin Jost) is immediately recognizable as an Elon Musk parody. An eccentric tech billionaire who owns his own private space exploration company (Moon X, inspired by Musk’s SpaceX), Mr. Moon is powerful, vain, dorky, and only interested in talking to people with a great deal of money. He’s also obsessed with cutting-edge technology.
An Elon-esque character in a 2025 movie may be a trigger for some viewers, given Musk’s role in present politics, but as co-director Pierre Perifel told Polygon via Zoom, the movie has been in planning for more than three years — since before The Bad Guys hit screens. In 2022, Musk was the Tesla guy who was trying to buy Twitter, not the Trump guy dismantling America’s social safety net. Perifel says Mr. Moon was never intended as direct mockery. “We didn’t really do a caricature of Elon Musk,” he said. “The parody came more from Moon X, SpaceX — it was more like a play on words, or a little wink, let’s say. And I think the fact that Mr. Musk has became what he is now pushed people to draw that comparison with our movie.”
Perifel says he and the Bad Guys 2 team — co-director JP Sans and screenwriters Yoni Brenner and Etan Cohen — felt “Moon X” would be an instantly recognizable gag as a name for a billionaire’s private space-exploration company. “It was so easy for us to just call that ‘Moon X,’ and then — ‘Done!’” he said. “People would immediately understand what that means, SpaceX being so famous. And now, in retrospect, three years later, you see what that guy has been doing, you’re like, Whoa. People are just drawing conclusions. We didn’t really intend to make a caricature of him at first — but at the end of the day, it’s kind of a fun wink, too, in a way.”
Moon winds up as a target in the movie’s central heist, but in the end, gets a lot less screen time than many of the other characters in the sprawling cast, including new additions The Bad Girls: big bad bruiser Pigtail (Maria Bakalova), infiltration artist Doom (Natasha Lyonne), and mastermind Kitty Kat (Danielle Brooks). Perifel says that actually left him wanting more time with Mr. Moon, something he’d consider for The Bad Guys 3, which hasn’t yet been green-lit, but is already in development, in case Bad Guys 2 does well.
“I really liked the way he turned out, honestly. I wish we could have had more time with him,” he said. “Colin Jost did such a great job with him — very dry. If anything, a bit more of that guy. I wouldn’t mind bringing him back, if we can later. I know it would be fun.”
If Bad Guys 3 does happen, though, Perifel wouldn’t want to update Mr. Moon to be more in line with Musk’s increasingly erratic public behavior, or his changing reputation as a cultural figure. “The problem is, when we do these kind of things in movies, you tend to anchor yourself in a period of time,” he said. “You date your film really quickly. So it’s fun in the moment, but later on you’re like, ‘Okay, what are we talking about here exactly?’ Movies age so quickly. So I think the idea is not to make too many pop-culture references, including referencing somebody in particular. That’s kind of contradicting a little bit what I said about SpaceX — but again, that’s just a wink. The movie works with it, or without it.”
The Bad Guys debuts in theaters on Aug. 1.