Ever since The Simpsons Movie hit theaters and grossed over half a billion dollars, there have been rumors about a sequel. The producers have never fully denied it as a possibility, but similarly, a Simpsons Movie sequel has never been in active development. Given the financial success of the first one, it’s always seemed inevitable that a second movie would eventually become a reality – it just had to serve the right business interests.
Now that Disney has acquired 21st Century Fox and therefore owns the rights to The Simpsons, that seems to have happened. Series creator Matt Groening has said that he has “no doubts” there will eventually be a second Simpsons movie in the wake of the Mouse House acquiring the show. But do we really need another Simpsons movie?
Back in 2007, The Simpsons Movie arrived as a breath of fresh air. The movie was highly anticipated, but the series’ decline in quality and the overall disappointing nature of TV-to-movie adaptations in general suggested audiences might be in for a dud. But unlike the movie versions of Entourage, Downton Abbey, Twin Peaks, and countless others, The Simpsons Movie is much more than just a mega-sized episode of the series.
With quadruple the runtime, the writers packed in four times the jokes, four times the plot points, and four times the emotional oomph. Whereas the average Simpsons episode has to wrap up any marital squabble between Homer and Marge in just 22 minutes, the movie used its feature-length runtime to really explore what would happen if Homer screwed up so badly that Marge actually left him for good, and the result was surprisingly powerful, largely thanks to Julie Kavner’s incredible performance.
It holds up to repeat viewings as well as any beloved “golden age” episode, because like the show’s classic early installments, The Simpsons Movie is bursting at the seams with smart, timeless gags, from churchgoers and barflies switching places in the face of imminent doom to Bart’s cleverly censored – and, for a brief moment, uncensored – skateboard ride to Krusty Burger in his birthday suit. Unfortunately for the writing staff, all of this means that a second movie would have even higher audience expectations than the first one.
Showrunner Al Jean tweeted that the season 26 episode “The Man Who Came to Be Dinner” was held back because the producers considered it to be cinematic enough to be turned into a movie. However, when the episode aired and its premise of the Simpsons traveling to Kang and Kodos’ home planet was stretched thin at just 22 minutes, fans were more relieved that these plans were abandoned than anything else. This is an amusing premise in theory, but it doesn’t open itself up to much relatability and relatability has been the key to The Simpsons’ three-decade longevity. This dysfunctional yellow family might live in an exaggerated cartoon world, but they’ve always felt like a real family.
The beauty of the first Simpsons Movie is that underneath the high-concept premise of Springfield being trapped in a dome, the Simpsons themselves were going through real, grounded family conflicts. Everybody had an emotional arc that brought them closer together or made them better versions of themselves. In “The Man Who Came to Be Dinner,” the outlandish high-concept sci-fi premise took precedence and there was no emotional substance.
Ultimately, for a Simpsons Movie sequel to work, the writers will need to come up with an idea that has as much potential as the first movie’s pre-Under the Dome domed city concept. The difficulty of coming up with such an idea is probably why it’s taken so long to make a Simpsons Movie 2. Maybe the series’ newer writers, who are content to put out mostly lackluster episodes each year, shouldn’t be involved in a potential second movie at all. Based on the half-baked nature of most modern Simpsons episodes, it seems like the majority of the current crop of writers aren’t interested in making their scripts as airtight as hall-of-famers like John Swartzwelder did in the show’s early days.
The original Simpsons Movie was credited to a crack team of 11 screenwriters, including Groening, Jean, and series co-developer (and revered filmmaker) James L. Brooks. Groening said of the writing process for the film, “We were able to get the best all-star writers of The Simpsons and write our hearts out.” If the Simpsons producers are able to come up with a juicy premise worthy of taking up an hour and a half of audiences’ time on the big screen, they should re-assemble all the A-list writers from Simpsons history who made the original movie such a delight, and who defined the uniquely absurdist tone of The Simpsons in the first place.