The Inbetweeners 3 has started filming – but it has a bit of an act to follow, and one or two tonal hurdles to navigate. A few thoughts. News broke at the start of this very week that, following rumours and reports last year, we are definitely about to see the return of The Inbetweeners ... 12 years on, the challenge facing The Inbetweeners 3
The Inbetweeners 3 has started filming – but it has a bit of an act to follow, and one or two tonal hurdles to navigate. A few thoughts.
News broke at the start of this very week that, following rumours and reports last year, we are definitely about to see the return of The Inbetweeners to our screens. In this case, in a brand new film, currently working under the title of The Inbetweeners 3.
The core quartet – Simon Bird, Joe Thomas, Blake Harrison and James Buckley – are back in front of the camera, with writers/directors Damon Beesley and Iain Morris behind it. A chance to give a hat tip to their enjoyable, underseen comedy The Festival here, too.
This is, for British cinema, a pretty big deal.
My abiding memory of 2011’s The Inbetweeners Movie, a low-budget British comedy feature film spun out of the successful TV series, was they wouldn’t let us in to an early screening. That initially, I wondered if there was a lack of condidence in it.
I was working at Den Of Geek at the time, and we’d enthusiastically covered the movie ahead of its release, yet we detected reticence and not much initial belief from its distributor. Critics be damned and all that, but the message was if we wanted to review the film was to go opening day and see it.
No problem, did that a lot. And so I went along to my local multiplex at Great Park in Rubery (was an Empire cinema at the time, now an Omniplex, for the purposes of the file), with a notepad in hand in case I needed to scribble a few bits, and sat back to enjoy the film.
Half way through it I got a tap on the shoulder from the cinema manager. He was doing an anti-piracy check, and was perturbed at me making notes. I pointed out, politely, that I could hardly draw the film and put it on the internet, he smiled and took the point, and we became friends not long after.
But the film was fun. Reviews, in spite of the apparent paranoia from the distributor at the time, were on the positive side. The movie itself was not massively cinematic in the Christopher Nolan sense, but it was and is funny and entertaining. And the cinema was also packed. At a time when studios were struggling to make films work that weren’t sequels or part of a universe, here was an upstart British comedy that went nuclear.
The opening weekend of The Inbetweeners Movie in the UK, at the end of August 2011, registered £13m in takings.
To put that in some degree of context, Cowboys & Aliens – starring Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig – opened in the UK that same weekend, earning £1.7m. The Hollywood blockbuster competition was wiped out.
Further context: a few weeks earlier, X-Men: First Class had been declared a box office hit in the UK off the back of a £5.4m opening weekend.
The numbers from The Inbetweeners Movie were seismic. It’s hard to fully get across just what a big deal it was. No British film had ever had an opening weekend in the UK quite like it (not even the previous record holder, Bridget Jones) and unsurprisingly, it set a record for the biggest opening ever for a UK independent production. In the 2011 box office chart, it ended up outgrossing Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, The Hangover Part II, Transformers: Dark Of The Moon and The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1.
This became a very big deal. Another film was inevitable.
Three years later, its sequel – The Inbetweeners 2 – repeated the trick. A much more cinematic production, it opened to £12.5m that August, the biggest opening weekend of the year in the UK. Between the two films to date, they’ve grossed nearly £80m at the British box office. Again, staggering numbers, especially considering the combined production budget was about a tenth of that.
After that? Things seemed to have come to an endpoint, and everybody moved on. The occasional question came up about a further adventure, but it tended to be downplayed. As Simon Bird said at the premiere of The Inbetweeners 2, “once you see the film you’ll see it feels like they’ve all moved on with their lives, so unfortunately this is it. It’s a great way to say goodbye.”
The goodbye lasted just over a decade.
Last October came the news of a planned reunion, although at that stage, it wasn’t clear whether it was as a film or TV show. At that point, the idea being speculated was a stag party, potentially in Las Vegas, which would make sense.
We know part of what’s happening next: that Netflix has stumped up for The Inbetweeners, and that we’re getting The Inbetweeners 3, on which filming has now begun. It sprung the announcement on Monday morning, with a specially-shot teaser trailer that tells us precisely nothing.
It’s unsurprising, therefore, that there should be should such interest and attention in a third movie, combined with the gnawing sense of disappointment that it’s Netflix’s chequebook that’s won out for the next movie. The hope is that there’s still a cinema release here, a la the recent Peaky Blinders movie, but Netflix isn’t daft: this’ll do streaming numbers in the UK, and large ones. That’s what it’s investing in.
The challenge, then, is the American Pie problem to an extent. That when we first met The Inbetweeners way back in 2008, the characters were in the latter stages of their school life. The actors playing them were in their early- to mid-20s, but in true Michael J Fox/Back To The Future style, got away with it. The first movie was billed as the four ‘becoming men.’
Now? Taking Joe Thomas as an example, he’s 42 years old. His character will be edging late 30s. And here’s the problem that the belated American Reunion film hit in 2012. There’s an innocence and charm – when done right – to teenagers and even early twentysomethings trying to find, er, ‘romance’. But when late thirtysomething men? That’s a difficult tonal tightrope.
Iain Morris and Damon Beesley are no mugs, of course, and we wait to see what they’ve come up with. But for the British film industry, this is a big deal. Especially if The Inbetweeners can hold a good fraction of that original audience (even better if it can recruit while it’s there.) It’s not quite a new James Bond level of announcement, but if this got a cinema release, and if Netflix reported numbers, it’s likely to be enough to get the franchise over £100m at the UK box office. How many series could boast that after three films?
More as we hear it. But right now? Filming is underway, the Inbetweeners are returning, and answers to much of the above sound like they’re going to arrive in 2027…
