This weekend was the press junket for Hot Tub Time Machine 2, which made it perfect for Franchise Fred. The sequel to 2010’s Hot Tub Time Machine picks up with Lou (Rob Corddry) and Nick (Craig Robinson) cashing in on their time machine while Jacob (Clark Duke) makes fun of them for it. Adam (John Cusack) is off being a successful author but the gang meets his son (Adam Scott) in the future.
So I asked the cast and director Steve Pink with writer Josh Heald about this approach to making a sequel without the full cast. They will not soon forget Franchise Fred.
Nuke the Fridge: I love sequels and I’ve earned the nickname Franchise Fred because I truly believe there should always be sequels to everything indefinitely.
Clark Duke: Who calls you that?
Rob Corddry: Did you make up your own nickname?
Steve Pink: Time out, time out. Like a barista? Like, “Hey Franchise Fred, double latte.”
Clark Duke: Come on, who’s calling you that?
Nuke: I can tell you the story. Outlaw Vern, the author of Seagology, named me Franchise Fred and I’ve run with it.
Steve Pink: Wait, are you saying that Outlaw Vern calls you Franchise Fred? That makes sense.
Nuke: So the question is, one of the ways to do a sequel without one of the original cast members is to have a sibling or son replacing them. How did you decide that was the right way to fill in this group?
Josh Heald: I like the idea of going back to the original movie’s mythology. What could we have missed? What seed could we have planted there that we could exploit? And it was the idea that when John Cusack’s character in the first movie breaks up with his girlfriend played by Lyndsy Fonseca, they had sex in that movie. What if he also impregnated her there and there was this love child that he never knew about? That just became like, “Okay, how old would that person be?” It kind of made sense he’d be exactly the same age as Clark in 2015 and 10 years older in 2025. That gave us the framework of a potential character and then we had to figure out how to make that character fit in.
Hot Tub Time Machine 2 opens Friday.