Elf had so much behind-the-scenes drama that a sequel was canceled amid ongoing feuds

On December 25, 2024By Littum

It’s hard to imagine anything negative next to thoughts of Will Ferrell’s overly bubbly Buddy from The 2003s Elf, but that’s what you’ll have to do if you want to keep rolling, so be warned.

According to a report from Daily Mail, things were quite dramatically behind the scenes of the popular holiday comedy – in more ways than one. In addition to casting issues—the twin boys originally cast as baby Buddy had to be replaced, and apparently Jim Carey was the original first choice for the lead role—there was also reportedly an on-set feud that contributed to Elf‘s fate as a solo film with no sequels.

James Caan, who played Buddy’s straight-laced human father Walter Hobbs in the film, revealed in a 2020 radio interview that Ferrell and Elf director Jon Favreau “didn’t get along” while making the film, and that their strained relationship played a big part in the fact that Elf never got a sequel.

“We wanted to do it and I was like, ‘Oh my god, I finally got a franchise movie, I could make some money, let my kids do whatever the hell they want.’ And the director and Will didn’t get along too well,’ Caan said in an interview on Cleveland’s 92.3 The Fan’s Bull & Fox show “So Will wanted to do it, he didn’t want the director and he had it in his contract, it was one of those things.”

Of course, there are multiple sides to every story, and while Caan pointed to a potential feud between Ferrell and Favreau as the reason we never got a Elf 2Ferrell has also been asked why the movie never got a sequel, and he had a different answer.

In 2021, the comedian confirmed Caan’s claim that a Elf the sequel had at one point been in the works when he told The Hollywood Reporter that he turned down $29 million to make what would have been the second film in the series due to problems with the script, which he believed just “rehashed” the story from the original film.

“I would have had to promote the film from an honest place, which would have been, like, ‘Oh no, it’s no good. I just couldn’t turn down that much money,'” he said at the time. “And I thought, “Can I actually say those words? I don’t think I can, so I guess I can’t make the film.”

Ferrell had previously shut down the idea of a 2013 sequel during an appearance on See what’s happening live when he told Andy Cohen that he would “absolutely not” do one Elf successor.

“It would look a little pathetic if I tried to squeeze back into the ‘Elf’ tights,” he said at the time (per USA today).

So feel free to make a big bowl of syrup- and candy-covered pasta and drown your sorrows in sugar and carbs if you need to, because it sounds like Elf 2 definitely never, ever happens.