The fourth movie in the stoner comedy franchise “Harold & Kumar,” starring John Cho and Kal Penn, is on track with the key players from the series on board, one of the producers, Greg Shapiro, said Tuesday.
During a panel discussion on producing at Karlovy Vary Film Festival, Shapiro said, “I made a series of movies called ‘Harold & Kumar.’ The first one was ‘Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle,’ and we made three, but we’re actually doing the fourth one pretty soon.”
Asked by Variety to expand on this, he said, “We’re working on the screenplay right now for the next ‘Harold & Kumar’ movie, but everybody’s back, the actors, the writers … the writers are directing, and hopefully we should be shooting it soon, you know, they’re just … it’s like any movie, it all has to come together in the right way.”
Last year, Variety reported that the original “Harold & Kumar” writers Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg were set to direct a new instalment in the series, and they would write the screenplay with Josh Heald.
The Hollywood Reporter, which broke the news of “Harold & Kumar 4,” said Hurwitz, Schlossberg and Heald would produce via their Counterbalance Entertainment banner, alongside Shapiro, who produced the original movies. Mandate Pictures, which also produced the original trio, would produce the film, with Nathan Kahane also serving as producer.
The original adventure, 2004’s “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle,” follows two pals whose pot-fueled munchies trip to the fast-food burger joint takes a zany turn. The comedy became a hit and spawned two sequels, 2008’s “Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay” and 2011’s “A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas.”
During the Karlovy Vary discussion, Shapiro noted that the second “Harold & Kumar” movie was made right before “The Hurt Locker,” which he also produced, and went on to win six Oscars.
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“Everyone sort of was scratching their heads, saying, ‘How can you make ‘Harold & Kumar,’ which has a lot of like really low-brow fart jokes in it, it’s a stoner comedy, and ‘The Hurt Locker,’ which is a really high-minded, very intense war film, and I never really wanted to answer like this, but in my mind I was always thinking: They’re kind of the same movie to me. My experience of it was, I love low-brow stoner comedies, and I also love really high-brow war films, so to me it was just working on something that I loved. I really loved both of those movies.”
From Variety US