will ferrell

Beaming families, teary smiles, mortarboards in the air — it’s graduation season, which means that more importantly, it’s celebrity commencement address season. While some high-profile speakers have received a chillier reception than others, the A-lister speech has long been a reliably amusing diversion in between long-winded orations from dusty academic types. Maya Rudolph took plenty of artistic license with “The Star-Spangled Banner” at my graduation ceremony from Tulane a few years ago, an unforgettable experience that I was too drunk to currently remember. But today brings video of another movie star taking the stage before a mass of fresh-faced students blissfully unaware of how hard getting a job is. Ladies, gentlemen, Will Ferrell is in the house.

No, it’s not a sequel to Step Brothers (but do we really need one, anyway?), but professional funny people Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly are reuniting for another new movie, which is still pretty great news. The actors are teaming up for Holmes and Watson, in which they’ll work their hilariously juvenile magic on the iconic literary duo of Sherlock Holmes and his pal, good ol’ Watson.

If you’ve logged onto Facebook or trolled Reddit today, you surely saw the exciting news: Step Brothers 2 is officially happening and it begins filming this year! Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly are back and they’re taking care of a baby! Oh great, a sequel to one of the funniest comedies of the past 25 years! Except it’s not true.

Is there a documented record for the most celebrity cameos in a single film? If there was, Zoolander 2 just broke it. The film opens with the murder of Justin Bieber and closes with ... well, without spoiling it, let’s say it closes with a whole slew of more cameos, and there’s at least 20 more in between. These are some of the biggest names from the world of fashion, music, TV, film, journalism, and pop culture. If Zoolander 2 was a party, the guest list alone would make it the greatest ever thrown. But Zoolander 2 is not a party. It is a movie. A bad movie. Never have so many cool people appeared in something so patently lame — or, as idiot male model Derek Zoolander mispronounces it, “luh-may.”

It’s been discussed a few times, but we’ve still never seen a sequel to Step Brothers, Adam McKay’s masterpiece about two grown men (Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly) whose parents marry, forcing them into an unlikely and unwanted familial relationship. And apart from a few small cameos and supporting appearances, Ferrell and Reilly, who also co-starred in McKay’s great Talladega Nights, haven’t made another movie together at all, with or without McKay. It’s enough to make a man give up hope, and possibly to stop lathering up their gorgeous six-pack abs with Kiehl’s.

Maybe you didn’t realize how much you missed Will Ferrell’s George W. Bush impression on SNL until the actor popped in for a surprise appearance during the cold open, delivering a State of the Union address on our current crop of GOP presidential hopefuls — which is essentially just Ferrell’s Dubbya roasting his fellow Republicans in an attempt to make an unprecedented bid for a third term as POTUS.

Cult comedies that attempt to regroup for a sequel many years after the original film often have mixed success. You’ll probably find few people who like Anchorman 2 or Dumb and Dumber To as much as the originals. But, that hasn’t stopped Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson from returning for Zoolander 2 and, despite the odds, this actually looks really funny.

After earning huge laughs with their whiskey-and-water dynamic in 2010's The Other Guys, Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell reteam for a comedy that puts a hilarious spin on the emotional fallout of divorce.

Will Ferrell is never not busy, which means that he’s never pinned down. He may be a successful solo movie star, but he’s a man of many partnerships, never missing an opportunity to share the screen with a variety of co-stars. With the arrival of Daddy’s Home, Ferrell hopes to bring his onscreen partnership with Mark Wahlberg to John C. Reilly-ian levels. Hopefully, the movie itself is funnier than the new trailer. After all, the last time these two teamed up, we got the massively underrated The Other Guys.

Last week brought an appropriately silly-seeming first look at Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig’s surprise Lifetime movie A Deadly Adoption, though the full trailer paints a decidedly different picture. The spoof is subtler, but just what kind of movie will A Deadly Adoption turn out to be?

Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig’s forthcoming Lifetime movie A Deadly Adoption has had a winding road to completion, first leaking to the press, then (jokingly?) canceled over the report, then back on. Now, there’s no stopping A Deadly Adoption (or a speeding truck) as Lifetime releases the first dramatic footage.

Individually, Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart are undeniably hilarious guys. Bringing two major comedic forces together on the big screen just makes sense on both a commercial and entertainment level. Unfortunately, Get Hard largely squanders the talents of Ferrell and Hart on an outdated premise with tired jokes, delivering what essentially amounts to one overlong joke about the terrors of prison rape.