It’s been seven and a half years since The Simpsons Movie, but it turns out that a recent Simpsons episode was initially developed as a potential film sequel. Executive producer Al Jean recently revealed that the January 4 episode he cowrote with David Mirkin “The Man Who Came to Be Dinner” was originally set to air as the season 24 finale in 2013, but it was held back by Jean and James L. Brooks to instead use as a plot for a possible film sequel. The film idea was ultimately scrapped because the episode was set in space: “We were worried that people might think it’s an idea that’s not canonical—it doesn’t really happen, unlike all of other 560 episodes that really ‘happened’—so the ultimate decision was to air it as an episode,” Jean explained to Entertainment Weekly. “It just got to the point where if we were unsure about it as a movie, then it would be good to air the episode. And then if we do a movie, we’d just think of something else…. So if you want to know what was thought of a possible Simpsons Movie 2, we just aired it—for free. You can see it for free!”
When asked about the odds of another Simpsons movie, Jean said: “My guess it’s 50-50. Our feeling is that the first movie was pretty successful and we don’t want the second movie to be any less successful. And I’m not talking about financially only—I’m also talking about no one wants to do a movie where people think, ‘Why did they do that? It wasn’t necessary.’”
