Twenty years ago, Will Ferrell walked onto a NASCAR track, told everyone that if you ain't first you're last, and accidentally made one of the most rewatchable comedies of the 2000s. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby just celebrated its 20th anniversary with a theatrical re-release, playing in theaters on June 28, June 30, and July 1. If you missed those screenings, honestly, it's still worth pulling up on streaming and remembering why this movie holds up the way it does.
The cast alone is worth revisiting. Ferrell plays Ricky Bobby, the bumbling but lovable NASCAR star who built his entire personality around a piece of advice his drunk father gave him at career day. John C. Reilly is his best friend and teammate Cal Naughton Jr., and the two of them together have a chemistry that made the movie feel like it could go on forever. Sacha Baron Cohen as Jean Girard, the flamboyant French Formula One driver who comes in to blow up Ricky Bobby's world, is doing something so specific and strange that it elevates every scene he's in. Amy Adams, Jane Lynch, and Gary Cole round out a supporting cast that is almost absurdly good for what is essentially a silly racing movie.
The film grossed over $163 million worldwide and debuted at number one at the box office, which makes it even more surprising that a sequel never happened. Turns out, one almost did. Adam McKay revealed this week that the plan was to send Ricky Bobby to Europe to race in Formula 1, where he would struggle to keep pace with cars that make a NASCAR stock car feel like a go-kart, and become convinced he had landed in a communist country the moment he found out hospital visits were free. McKay said the sequel died not for lack of ideas but for lack of energy, because shooting race car content is an enormous undertaking and by the time Talladega Nights wrapped, he and Ferrell were spent. They went and made Step Brothers in a house instead, which honestly tracks.
The other reason there was never a Talladega Nights 2 is that McKay and Ferrell's friendship eventually unraveled. The partnership that gave us Anchorman, Talladega Nights, and Step Brothers dissolved when McKay cast John C. Reilly as Jerry Buss in HBO's Winning Time without telling Ferrell, who had wanted the role and found out from Reilly himself. They reportedly haven't spoken since. It's one of those Hollywood fallout stories that makes a sequel feel both impossible and weirdly poetic.
Here's the thing about Talladega Nights that doesn't get said enough: it's actually a great sports movie underneath the absurdism. The racing sequences are genuinely thrilling, shot with real cars in front of live crowds at Charlotte Motor Speedway. McKay and Ferrell even had the actors take driving classes at the Richard Petty Driving Experience. Christopher Nolan once called it one of the great comedies and said he can never switch it off when he finds it on TV, which is the most perfectly correct thing Nolan has ever said. If you haven't seen it in a while, the anniversary re-release is a good excuse to fix that.
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