Triplets, the film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Danny DeVito and Eddie Murphy, won’t be happening after all.
Go back over the career of Arnold Schwarzenegger, and he cut few better deals than the one that saw him take his first comedy lead role in the film Twins. Co-starring Danny DeVito, Schwarzenegger was unproven as a comedy star in 1988 when the film came out. As such, he took a relatively low up front fee – as did DeVito and director Ivan Reitman – and instead a far healthier slice of the box office returns.
There were a lot of box office returns.
Since that time, there’s been on-off conversation about a follow-up. Schwarzenegger took on a trio of further comedy projects, but a Twins follow-up wasn’t one of them. There were conversations, but in a new interview with GQ, DannyDeVito has basically killed off the idea for good.
The plan that was bubbling up was a new film called Triplets, that would reunite Schwarzenegger and DeVito in the lead role, and add Eddie Murphy to the ensemble. Ivan Reitman was all set to return to direct the movie too, but his unexpected death in 2022 ended a project that had once again gathered momentum. After ten years of conversation, Universal was looking to get the film shot in 2022, but things – as you might expect – ground to a halt.
It didn’t instantly end the chances of the film happening, but an interview Schwarzenegger gave earlier this year suggested that Ivan’s son, Jason, has effectively parked the sequel. Now, DeVito has extinguished any chance of it.
He jokingly said that the film’s chances fell when Schwarzenegger pursued his political career in the early 2000s, saying “we missed Twins 2 because he became governor – which, he should have done Twins 2 instead of becoming governor.”
Yet DeVito did tease that another project may have taken its place, saying “we have a little thing going, a little project that we’ve chatted about.”
What is it? Good question, but he’s adamant it’s nothing to do with Twins at all.
Which all means we can add Triplets to the list of sequels that never came to pass. As and when we hear more about the Schwarznegger/DeVito film that is going ahead – please let it be The Running Man 2 – then we’ll let you know.
