“My comedy is too dry and unsentimental for the new masters,” says Greg Mottola of his cancelled Confess, Fletch sequel.
A planned sequel to the 2022 comedy Confess, Fletch is no longer happening, its director and co-writer Greg Mottola has confirmed. Jon Hamm, who played the title role of Irwin ‘Fletch’ Fletcher, was keen to return for at least one further film, and a script had been written, but a changing of executives at Miramax appears to have ended the chances of it getting made.
“Alas, the new head of Miramax, who controls the rights to all the books, shot down my sequel project,” Mottola wrote in response to a post written by critic Bilge Ebiri on Twitter/X/Muskbook. “The Fletch curse got me.”
With that response triggering messages from other users who expressed their affection for the comedy thriller, Mottola responded with some surprisingly candid insights into the sequel’s cancellation.
“I was told ‘the first one lost money’ – as if there had been any attempt to make money,” the filmmaker wrote. “Jon [Hamm] was very into the new script. I’ve been rather depressed about it, but hard to expect a good break in the feature world these days.”
When another user pointed out that Confess, Fletch didn’t recoup its $20m budget at the box office, Mottola replied that Miramax “dropped it in theatres for a week with virtually no marketing, then stuck it on Showtime (with nary a billboard or commercial). It was essentially a streaming movie.”
Elsewhere, Mottola added that he was “okay with the idea of [the sequel] probably being a streaming movie, but I was only going to do it my way.”
Based on the Gregory Mcdonald book, Confess, Fletch saw Hamm’s quick-witted reporter on the trail of some stolen paintings belonging to the father of his Italian girlfriend. Reviews were highly positive, and Mottola said in 2022 that he’d been commissioned to write a sequel, this one based on the 1978 novel, Fletch’s Fortune.
As pointed out by The Hollywood Reporter, however, the departure of Miramax CEO Bill Block was what ultimately doomed the sequel’s prospects. “It was bad luck for me that Bill Block got fired,” Mottola wrote, adding, “I got caught in the changing of the guard, and my comedy is too dry and unsentimental for the new masters.”
There was an opportunity to sell the project elsewhere for a time, according to THR’s sources, though that period has also expired. “Yeah, it’s dead,” Mottola wrote in another response. “I just have to kill the Fletch part of my (black) heart.”
