“From the start, we had every indication that it wouldn’t work,” Will Ferrell says of the first Anchorman in the new issue of FHM. “Studios didn’t get it. Nobody wanted to make it. And when we made the film, it didn’t test well with audiences at all, and nobody knew how to market it.”
Although it was met with lukewarm reviews and didn’t do particularly well at the box office, the original Anchorman started to develop a cult following after it was released on DVD and is now regarded as a comedy classic. The fandom surrounding Anchorman is so great that the sequel is arguably the year’s most anticipated comedy simply on the basis of its title alone.
Even so, Ferrell is open to the possibility that the sequel could flop. “The first one was such a crap-shoot in a way, and so is this one really. We’ll see what happens. It’s either going to be a horrible mistake, or maybe what we’ve done–which is hard to do–is pull off a sequel as satisfying as the first movie.”
The new issue of FHM hits newsstands tomorrow.