Making a sequel to the beloved 1980 movie The Blues Brothers after costar John Belushi‘s death was already going to be a difficult challenge. Director John Landis says movie executives made it impossible by interfering with the script for 1998’s Blues Brothers 2000.
“I was very pissed off by what Universal did to me on Blues Brothers 2000 and that was my first experience with the new corporate Hollywood,” the Animal House, Trading Places and Coming to America director told IFC in 2011. “Everything is by committee now, and they destroyed that movie, though the music is still good. This happens to filmmakers all the time, where producers and studios fuck with their picture, and when you’re promoting the movie you can’t say that.”
In 2004 Landis told the AV Club that he, Belushi and Dan Aykroyd had planned to make a Blues Brothers sequel, but Belushi’s 1982 death scuttled that idea. Aykroyd eventually rekindled the band with Jim Belushi and John Goodman alternately filling in for John, and in the late ’90s Aykroyd and Landis decided the time was right for a sequel.
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“We wrote what I thought was a terrific script,” Landis recalled. “Then Universal Studios eviscerated it. That was a strange experience, because the first thing they said was that it had to be PG, which meant they couldn’t use profanity, which is basically cutting the Blues Brothers’ nuts off. The first movie is an R-rated film, but there’s no nudity or violence in it. It’s just the language. Then they said, ‘You have to have a child, you have to have…’ The bottom line was, the only way that movie was going to get made was to agree with everything they said.”
Watch the ‘Blues Brothers 2000’ Trailer
After a truly touching opening scene that finds Ayrkoyd’s Elwood Blues waiting in vain for Belushi’s Jake Blues to pick him up from prison, Blues Brothers 2000 quickly devolves into a disjointed mess full of cliched characters and toothless retreads of the comedic set pieces from the original movie. The movie was largely panned upon release, and quickly vanished from movie theaters.
Why Dan Aykroyd Put Up With ‘Blues Brothers 2000’ Studio Interference
Landis says Aykroyd was willing to endure the studio interference for a very noble reason: He wanted to use the movie to record blues and soul legends such as Dr. John, Aretha Franklin, B.B King in action for posterity. “That’s the only time I never really fought with the studio, because they didn’t really want to make [the movie],” Landis explained. “So we did every single thing they said. By the time we’d done that, the script was kind of homogenized and uninteresting. Danny said, ‘It’s about the music. It’s just about the music, John, so don’t worry about it. We’ll get the best people, and we’ll make a great album, and get these people on film. We have to document these people.'”
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Gallery Credit: Corey Irwin