Spinal Tap 2: Rob Reiner and the original cast reunite to smell the glove one more time

Make sure your stage plan is drawn to scale and start enlisting an army of replacement drummers because Spinal Tap is returning! Last October, Castle Rock Entertainment announced that it’s getting back in the game, and now we know the film division’s first feature project, Spinal Tap 2! 

A sequel to the 1984 cult classic This is Spinal Tap; Spinal Tap 2 finds Rob Reiner returning to the director’s chair as filmmaker Marty DiBergi. Also back to turn the sequel up to eleven are David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean), Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer), and Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest), the three members of Spinal Tap that manage to stay alive throughout their storied careers.

The Cannes Film Festival announced that This is Spinal Tap would screen on the beach as part of the Cinema de la Plage sidebar on Wednesday, May 18. Guest, McKean, Reiner, and Shearer are behind getting the band back together for another film in the Spinal Tap saga. Frank Marshall will produce, and Matthew George, Jonathan Fuhrman, and Hernan Narea will executive produce on behalf of Castle Rock.

Deadline spoke with Reiner about the surprise sequel to This is Spinal Tap, saying, “The plan is to do a sequel that comes out on the 40th anniversary of the original film and I can tell you hardly a day goes by without someone saying, why don’t you do another one? For so many years, we said, ‘nah.’ It wasn’t until we came up with the right idea how to do this. You don’t want to just do it, to do it. You want to honor the first one and push it a little further with the story.”

Guest, McKean, and Shearer wrote the music and lyrics for the original film – alongside Reiner for select tracks – like Smell the Glove, Hell Hole, Big Bottom, and Lick My Love Pump.

“They’ve played Albert Hall, played Wembley Stadium, all over the country and in Europe,” Reiner said. “They haven’t spent any time together recently, and that became the premise. The idea was that Ian Faith, who was their manager, he passed away. In reality, Tony Hendra passed away. Ian’s widow inherited a contract that said Spinal Tap owed them one more concert. She was basically going to sue them if they didn’t. All these years and a lot of bad blood we’ll get into and they’re thrown back together and forced to deal with each other and play this concert.”

In addition to the original Spinal Tap band members (minus the late Tony Hendra), the sequel may also feature guest artists. “The thing I’ve heard from so many bands and we’re talking about possibly doing a couple books, but one will be Tap Moments that real bands have had. Like in the movie, they get stoned and can’t find the stage, that happened to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. When Nigel is frustrated by the little bread in the catering that won’t hold the cold cuts, that last one was taken from a Rolling Stone article about a tour Van Halen had when, in their rider, they didn’t want brown M&Ms. We had an original keyboard player, Jonathan Sinclair, who when he was with the band Uriah Heep, visited us and said they’d been book into a military base, and we put that in, too. When I met with Sting years ago, he said, I’ve seen that movie 50 times and every time I watch it I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Because it’s so much what happens. With all of that, we’ve had a lot of bands share their experiences and so hopefully we’ll include some of that in the film.”

“I’m back playing Marty DiBergi,” Reiner said about stepping back into his iconic role for This is Spinal Tap. “The band was upset with the first film. They thought I did a hatchet job and this is a chance to redeem myself. I am such a big fan and I felt bad they didn’t like what they saw in the first film. When I heard they might get back together, I was a visiting adjunct teacher’s helper at the Ed Wood School of Cinematic Arts. I drop everything to document this final concert.”

Reiner aims to unleash Spinal Tap 2on March 19, 2024.

“You have no idea what’s going to happen and the first time we screened in Dallas, they didn’t know what the hell it was,” Reiner explained. “People came up to me and said, I don’t understand why would you make a movie about a band no one has heard of and is so bad. Why would you do it? I said, it’s satire and I would explain, but it took a while for people to catch up to it. Now, it’s in the National Film Registry,” Reiner crowed.