Will Ferrell declined to return as the cheerful elf, Buddy, for a sequel to his holiday comedy acclaimed comedies of Will Ferrell's career. While Elf told a very different story from many holiday season family comedies, this was what enshrined it as the Christmas classic that it's become.
In Elf, Ferrell plays Buddy, a human who was accidentally taken back to the North Pole as an orphan baby by Santa Claus (Ed Asner), and grows up as one of Santa's elves. When Buddy learns the truth about his human origins, he decides to venture back to New York City to find his father Walter Hobbs (James Caan). Buddy also develops a romance with retail worker Jovie (Zooey Deschanel) and, by Elf's end, has elevated the world's holiday season cheer with his undying positivity.
Will Ferrell has spoken of being offered $29 million to come back for an Elf 2, but declined, stating that he couldn't honestly promote what he felt was a substandard sequel. In Ferrell's words to THR, "I would have had to promote the movie from an honest place, which would’ve been, like, 'Oh no, it’s not good. I just couldn’t turn down that much money.' And I thought, 'Can I actually say those words? I don’t think I can, so I guess I can’t do the movie.'" What lends credence to Ferrell's decision to turn down Elf 2 is that the first movie didn't leave much room for an organic sequel to be made.
Elf tells a complete character arc for Buddy, who learns that he's human and seeks to reconnect with the world he left behind. Being brought up as an elf, Buddy still has a Christmas spirit that knows no equal when he arrives in New York. While his interactions with human society are frequently awkward, he brings out the goodness in formerly cynical people by the kind of person he is.
At the end of Elf, Buddy hasn't left his elf nature or personality behind, but has started a family with Jovie at the North Pole, and now has a home in the worlds of both humans and elves. In other words, Buddy's journey had reached its conclusion by the end of Elf, so without a compelling new story for Buddy to continue into, Elf 2 didn't have a lot of new material to go on. Elf is now as much of a staple of the holiday season as the Elf itself before an early test screening. With the beloved Christmas movie that Elf became already wrapping up Buddy's arc as well as it did, a fresh new story would be a necessity for an Elf sequel, and with Ferrell believing that was absent, he made the right call.
