Summary

• Writer-director Greg Mottola has offered a dispirting update on the possible Confess, Fletch sequel Fletch's Fortune.
• In a recent post on X, the filmmaker revealed that the new head of Miramax shot down the project.
• Mottola lamented that "the Fletch curse got me."

2022's Confess, Fletch reviews were almost overwhelmingly positive, earning the movie a Certified Fresh score of 86% on Rotten Tomatoes along with a 75% audience score.

Despite director and co-writer Greg Mottola having initially been hired to write a sequel adapting the novel Fletch's Fortune, the writer-director has shared a dispiriting update on a possible sequel to Confess, Fletch when responding to a joke on X about how multiple Fletch sequels need to be made. See the post below:

When responding to the joke, Mottola revealed that the replacement for the head of Miramax "shot down my sequel project" and lamented that "the Fletch curse got me." Because the person in question has the book rights, this likely means that the sequel cannot be made elsewhere. The director then explained the executive's reasoning, and why it didn't make much sense:

Mottola was told that Confess, Fletch didn't make money, with the director adding "as if there had been any attempt to make money," referencing the movie's short theatrical window before a streaming premiere on Showtime. itting to feeling "rather depressed about it," he remarked that it's "hard to expect a good break in the feature [film] world these days."

What Is The Fletch Curse?

Fletch's Development Hell Explained

While the existence of the Confess, Fletch movie seemed to refute the existence of the Fletch curse, it does seem to have returned in full force, as Mottola says. The curse to which he is referring is the fact that new projects in the Fletch franchise have had a habit of withering on the vine and languishing in production hell after the release of the Chevy Chase duology. While the original Fletch made $59 million against its $8 million budget, its sequel was less of a secure hit, only earning $39.5 million against the same price tag.

This did not stop producers from attempting to develop new projects adapting various stories involving the Fletch character, but it may have been one of the reasons that they failed to come to the screen in the ensuing decades between 1989 and 2022. The project, which was for the majority of its life going to be an adaptation of Fletch Won, was alternately set to be helmed by Kevin Smith and Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence, struggled to come to fruition from the mid-1990s through 2019, at which point it had most recently been set to star Jason Sudeikis as Fletch.

Stars who were considered for the Fletch project at vairous stages of development throughout the 1990s and 2000s included Chevy Chase, Jason Lee, Will Smith, Ben Affleck, Brad Pitt, Adam Sandler, and Jimmy Fallon.

Confess, Fletch getting made proved that a version of the project was able to escape production hell. However, its compromised pandemic-era release seems to have left it in limbo in of proving its commercial viability as a franchise. It seems that a return to this particular Jon Hamm role is not in the cards, no matter how beloved it may be by audiences and critics alike.

Source: Greg Mottola/X