Mel Brooks brings farce to CinemaCon.
Mr. Brooks did not attend the annual convention in Las Vegas, but the 99-year-old comedy legend sent in a pre-recorded video for the long-awaited sequel to the 1987 sci-fi parody “Spaceballs.” In the short clip, he also announced the sequel’s official title: Spaceballs: The New One.
The film reunites the original cast with Rick Moranis as Lord Dark Helmet, George Weiner as Colonel Sanders, Daphne Zuniga as Princess Vespa, Bill Pullman as Lone Star, and Brooks as a Yoda-like being. Josh Gad, KiKi Palmer, Louis Pullman, and Anthony Carrigan join the ensemble, playing new characters whose identities are kept secret.
Moranis, Zuniga, Gad and the Pullmans took to the CinemaCon stage to unveil the trailer for “Spaceballs: The New One,” which parodies everything from “Star Wars” to “Avatar” to “Harry Potter.” Similar to the opening scene of The Force Awakens, there’s a sandy desert scene with robots and Jedi-like explorers roaming the dunes, as well as characters frozen in carbonite like Han Solo. Sci-fi jokes followed, including Lord Dark Helmet, played by Avatar’s Moranis, urinating into a urinal next to a Na’vi tribe.
Amazon MGM was similarly coy about the sequel’s storyline, writing in a release that “plot details are being kept under lock and key and under the shield of the industry-powerful Schwartz.” Like the original, the sequel is expected to be set in a very, very, very, very, very far galaxy and draw inspiration from popular sci-fi franchises like Star Wars, Star Trek and Alien.
Josh Greenbaum, known for “Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar” and “Will & Harper,” will direct the film from a screenplay by Gad, Benji Samit, and Dan Hernandez. Spaceballs: The New One is scheduled for release on April 23, 2027.
Brooks, who co-wrote and directed the original sci-fi parody, shared news of the sequel last year with a distinctive “Star Wars” crawl video that read, “38 years ago, the Star Wars trilogy But since then, there have been prequel trilogies, sequel trilogies, sequels to prequels, prequels to sequels, countless TV spinoffs, and spinoffs that are both prequels and sequels. (…) But in 38 years there was only one “Spaceball”. Until now…”
