Here’s an interesting piece of news from the Hollywood vaults; a potential sequel to Bruce Almighty was pitched that would have given Jim Carrey’s reporter the powers of Satan.
During an interview with SYFY the films co-screenwriters Steve Koren and Mark O’Keefe revealed that Brucifer would have seen Carrey’s Bruce Nolan granted the powers of Satan instead of Morgan Freeman’s God.
According to Koren, both Carrey and his manager were keen on the idea and so they “went in and pitched it, but it never quite worked out, because it was later on … It would have been another giant movie and I don’t think they wanted to do it. It just didn’t work out for some reason, but a lot of people loved it, including Jim.”
One of the reasons it never got off the ground was that they wanted to steer the sequel to the $484 million grossing original down a much darker path, which would have seen Bruce turn to the dark side following the death of Jennifer Aniston’s Grace.
Brucifer would have resurrected Grace as a zombie, on which Koren said: “You tend to lose your faith when the world seems unfair, and that’s what got him. It came from a serious place, but we were gonna write it in a very friendly way. We certainly didn’t want to depress people. So I think that scared [the studio] a little bit, but to Jim’s credit, he totally understood that we were going to make a big comedy and thought everybody would connect with it.”
Another more logical reason as to why Universal weren’t interested in the idea when the duo pitched it in 2010 was because all of this came in the wake of the actual sequel to Bruce Almighty being a catastrophic flop at the box-office. 2007’s Evan Almighty starred the original’s scene-stealing Steve Carrell in a $200M budgeted dud, which only grossed $174M worldwide.
Carrey announced that he was retiring from acting during the press rounds for Sonic the Hedgehog 2, saying that “I’ve done enough”, so the idea for Brucifer will have to suitably remain in pre-production hell for eternity.
SEE ALSO: When Jim Carrey Was a Revelation
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