Will Farrell's hasn't been shy about jumping into the Ron Burgundy costume to spend an extended amount of time in character. He and his co-stars appear able to riff as the Action 4 News Team for hours on end and feel completely at home doing so. This was obviously especially true once the cameras were rolling on the set of Anchorman 2, the end result is an alternate cut of the film with completely different jokes.
In a recent interview, director Adam McKay told the press the crew had shot more than a million feet of film during the production of the film, most of which being the actors improvising jokes and alternate versions of scenes. Because of this, the original rough cut of the movie ended up clocking in at nearly four hours.
Since that time, the movie has been cut significantly and many of the jokes ended up being cut after frequent test screenings to determine which was the funniest.
"On this movie, which we've never done before, we did A and B screenings. So we were doing two screenings every night. So you had one whole rack of jokes in the A screening, and then you had a different rack of jokes in the B screening. The B screening was like the minor leagues. So if a joke got a big laugh in the B screening, we would then bring it up... we would move it into the A column," McKay told IGN.
As it turns out, the crew has so much footage that they've begun the initial stages of releasing an alternate version of the film. Both will have the same plot but with entirely different jokes.
"Brent was on the first anchorman with me, we did that together," he said. "We came into the editing room, and he told me, 'I think you have a whole second movie here.' So Brent actually cut the Wake Up, Ron Burgundy version... So this time, I came to the editing room, and I go, 'Well, Brent, do we have a second movie?' Brent goes, 'You don't have a second movie, but you have a whole other movie with all new jokes.' I go, 'What do you mean?' He goes, 'You can replace every single joke with their quality alts.' So that was crazy, and sure enough, we're doing it right now. I think we're at 250 alt jokes."
According to the director, the question now is simply what Paramount wants to do with the alternate version of the film. Some of the options include a release to theaters, midnight screenings, VOD and DVD.
"I hope they do it. It'd be really fun, even if they just did it on, like, 200 screens or something, just to see it play. We're actually going to test it. We're talking about putting it in front of a crowd."
