Though their world has been consumed with work on The Lego Movie, Phil Lord and Chris Miller have also been developing a follow-up to hit comedy** 21 Jump Street**. Now they’ve opened up to Collider about the tough process of crafting what will be called** 22 Jump Street.
While the pair originally planned to segue from Lego land back to **Jump Street **once the ‘toon hit its animation stage in February, they’ve been so busy with the CG plastic figures that they only recently committed to the comedy. "People don’t wanna see the same movie that they saw the first time, they don’t wanna see something super different from the first movie, and navigating what that is has been challenging," explains Miller. "We didn’t really sign on to this movie until about a month ago because we didn’t feel like we were sure that it would be a good movie, and then finally we got to a point in the script where we were like, ‘Okay, I believe this will be a good movie.’”
So what did they find in the script, which Michael Bacall and Oren Uziel have cooked up? “What made the movie take off is when we started to really think about, ‘Oh what’s it like to be in a partnership?’ especially because we have a lot to say about what it’s like to be in a partnership, and Chris is married and I have a longtime girlfriend so we have two partnerships,” says Lord. “So really making that thing work seemed like a deeper way to go in that it would create a lot of story possibilities and a lot of comedy.”
The plot will continue the partnership between Jenko (Channing Tatum) and Schmidt (Jonah Hill), with more input from the gruff Captain Dickson (Ice Cube). “It’s more about their marriage, basically,” says Lord. “If the first movie is about two people getting together for the first time, this is about what happens if you try to really make the relationship work. We’ll probably never do another bromance after this one, but we’re trying to get as emotionally deep into that as possible.”
Oh, and it’s called** 22 Jump Street **because… they move across the street. Nice touch.
**22 Jump Street **should be shooting this September in New Orleans. For more from the pair, head to Collider. And for our full report on what they said about The Lego Movie at Comic-Con, point your browser here.