Set to shoot alongside Dumb And Dumber To, Jim Carrey wanted to emulate Paranormal Activity's runaway success with a Dumb & Dumber spin-off.
Here’s a curious story of a film that ever was. Everything Everywhere All At Once director Daniel Kwan has revealed a story from earlier in his career where Jim Carrey pitched him the idea of shooting a found footage horror comedy focused on the production of Dumb and Dumber To… to be shot during the production of Dumb and Dumber To.
Whilst chatting during a writer’s roundtable for The Hollywood Reporter, Kwan recalled that he and his creative partner, Daniel Scheinert were approached by Carrey once upon a time, just after Paranormal Activity had come out. He had the plan for a found footage comedy movie, and in Kwan’s words, “basically, the set of Dumb & Dumber was famously a haunted set — it was in the same hotel that The Shining was inspired by — and he’s like ‘the whole time we were shooting, things were breaking, people were getting hurt, doors were swinging, and it felt haunted. We’re going to shoot Dumb And Dumber To, and I want you guys to do a found-footage horror comedy on the set. While we’re filming, you guys are going to make a feature-length, behind-the-scenes video that slowly becomes a horror film”.
It’s certainly a novel idea and one that would be a little too avant-garde for the producers of Dumb And Dumber To to commit to. Whilst it’s common these days for franchise films to shoot back-to-back, or for ‘making-of’ documentaries to be shot alongside films, shooting two connected-yet-separate films simultaneously would have been quite the enterprise. We can recall hearing that the creative team behind 2012’s Avengers Assemble went off for a week’s break to shoot Much Ado About Nothing partway through the former’s production schedule, but Carrey’s idea was even more ambitious than that.
Too ambitious, it would seem. Kwan revealed that they wrote an outline for the film, but the studio quickly nixed the idea.
A pity really. Dumb and Dumber To would prove to be a huge disappointment whereas an oddball project emerging at the same time that went in a much stranger direction would have been intriguing and perhaps more reflective of the less obvious direction that Carrey was charting his career towards at the time.
You can catch the writer’s roundtable, which also features Jordan Peele, Rian Johnson, Tony Kushner, Chinonye Chukwu, and Martin McDonagh right here.
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