Alexander Payne confirms that development is ongoing for Election 2, but the setting is set to be changed. More here.
Back in 2023, Alexander Payne was out and about promoting The Holdovers when he confirmed that a sequel to 1999’s Election was still in the works, but could yet “go either way”. At the time, it seemed like Payne was simply to busy to give the project his full attention, but his interest in bringing back Reese Witherspoon as the formidable Tracy Flick was clear:
“Tom Perotta, who wrote the book Election, has written a very fine sequel,” Payne declared, “and Reese Witherspoon and I have talked about it.”.
He added too that “Jim Taylor and I, my co-writer, have talked about doing it. But we just haven’t gotten to it yet. It’s only because everything takes a while, and I have a couple things to do before that. We’ll just see how it falls. It would be lovely to do.”
In Perotta’s source follow-up novel, Tracy Flick hasn’t entered into a successful career in politics as she memorably intended to in the first film. Instead, she’s struggling with adulthood and working as a teacher, much like her nemesis who was played by Matthew Broderick in the 1999 feature.
According to Movieweb, Payne has now stated that he is actively developing the project, with one rather large caveat.
“We hadn’t thought about a sequel until Tom Perrotta wrote this fine book… The only trouble was that I just can’t go back to high school. I just can’t do it. So Jim and I have re-conceived it differently, and we’re actively working on it.”
So, it appears that the setting of Perotta’s novel will be abandoned because Payne has had enough of high school settings, and given that he’s already given us Election and more recently, The Holdovers, we can see his point.
Where this goes next though is anybody’s guess, but we’re looking forward to finding out. The original Election is an absolute gem of a film and was the recipient of a 4K disc release last year for its 25th birthday. Should you wish to, you can also reminisce about the film’s brilliance by checking out this episode of the Film Stories Podcast.
We’ll bring you more on Election 2 as we hear it.
