Sony officially put 24 Jump Street into development this week, twelve years after 22 Jump Street grossed $331 million worldwide and the franchise inexplicably went quiet despite immediate sequel talk. Variety broke the news on Wednesday.
Channing Tatum, Jonah Hill and Ice Cube are all in talks to return as Schmidt, Jenko and Captain Dickson. Phil Lord and Chris Miller, who directed both previous films, are back as producers.
Rodney Rothman, who co-wrote 22 Jump Street and directed Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, is directing from a script he wrote with Hill and Meghan Malloy.
The question everyone is asking first is obvious: Why 24 and not 23? The answer is the best piece of franchise self-awareness in the announcement. The franchise skipped 23 Jump Street because, in the words of producer Neal Mortiz, "it took so long to make we had to skip one."
The real answer, which every fan of the films already knows, is that the legendary end credits sequence of 22 Jump Street already took care of it.
That sequence, a rapid-fire mockery of Hollywood sequel culture showing Schmidt and Jenko going undercover at medical school, culinary school, a flight school, a seminary, eventually into outer space and finally becoming an animated cartoon, ran through every conceivable version of a 23 Jump Street so comprehensively that the actual movie would have to live in its shadow.
Skipping to 24 is the correct move. The franchise wrote 23 twelve years ago and filmed it in about four minutes.
The original films remain genuinely good. 21 Jump Street in 2012 was the rarest kind of movie, an adaptation of a corny 1980s TV show that became one of the smartest comedies of its decade through sheer self-awareness and the specific chemistry between Tatum and Hill, two actors who were not conventionally supposed to be funny together and turned out to be one of the best comedy pairings of their era.
22 Jump Street understood that the sequel had to be about being a sequel to stay true to what the first film was, which is why it spent most of its running time making jokes about sequels while simultaneously being a good one.
24 Jump Street is in development. No release date. No production start date. Just the announcement that it is happening, the cast is in talks and the people who made the franchise work are assembled to try again after twelve years.
Development announcements do not always become movies. This one feels like it probably will.