The Simpsons Creator Shares Bad News for Fans Waiting for New Movie

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It’s been a very long time since The Simpsons Movie first hit theaters, and franchise creator Matt Groening revealed the wait for a follow up will likely take even longer. Speaking with ScreenDaily during the Annecy International Film Festival, Groening opened up about how much stress making the first film alongside the currently running TV series was for the creative team. There’s still just a bit of hope for a sequel overall, however, as Groening also stated, “So in a perfect world, we would do [another] movie. We’ll see.”

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Are We Ever Getting a New Simpsons Movie?

“The first movie killed us,” said The Simpsons creator Matt Groening began when speaking about The Simpsons Movie potentially getting a follow up. “We don’t have a ‘B team’; we did the movie and continued doing the series at the same time.” They were literally working towards a countdown adding even more onto that stress, “We even had a countdown clock on the wall – we called it The Simpsons death clock – counting down the months, weeks, days, seconds til we had to have the movie finished. And it made us break down.” Before then revealing, “So in a perfect world, we would do [another] movie. We’ll see.”

The Simpsons Movie director David Silverman then added, “We don’t want to take a break [from making the series]…We have to get a story that needs to be a movie.” Showrunner Matt Selman also stressed how the show has been changing its formats in recent years too, so it makes crafting a new cinematic story all the tougher to get together, “The best The Simpsons episodes are structured like little movies anyway, through the three-act structure…So when you see it in the theatre, you have to think, why is this big screen worthy?”

Why Do Fans Still Want The Simpsons Movie 2?

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The Simpsons Movie was a major success among fans, and even was a notable hit in theaters at the time. It was one of the few animated franchises to make the jump to the big screen in that way, and fans have been asking for more ever since thanks to its final post-credits tease of a potential sequel. It’s been such a long wait that Groening himself as pointed fun at in future franchises like Futurama and more. But it’s likely that fans won’t get one any time soon.

It’s clear that the creative team wants to do a new movie, but The Simpsons itself at this point has become such a forward moving machine that a new movie likely won’t be on the table until at least the series is over. But at the same time, cinematic ideas changing the scope of the franchise have been making their way to either Disney+ through exclusive streaming releases, or into the latest seasons themselves. It really is a tough job to try and craft a whole movie alongside a successful TV release without sacrificing the quality of either, and that’s a kind of stress that the creative team likely doesn’t want to revisit any time soon.