Summer of 2017 is about to get a lot more hot and very wet. One year after reviving cult comedy Wet Hot American Summer with prequel series First Day of Camp, Netflix is revisiting the wacky Camp Firewood with sequel Ten Years Later. Set one decade after the events of the 2001 film – which chronicled the last day of a fictional Maine summer camp in 1981 – the eight-episode, 30-minute show will premiere in 2017.
“Let’s all promise that 10 years from today, we’ll meet again and see what kind of people we’ve blossomed into,” Ben (Bradley Cooper) tells his campmates in a teaser video. His request builds into a discussion over whether to meet at 9:00 or 9:30 a.m. on that day. “Why don’t we say 9:30 and then make it your beeswax to be here by 9:30?” says an adamant McKinley (Michael Ian Black). “We’re all going to be in our late Twenties by then – I just don’t see any reason we can’t be places on time.”
Ten Years Later will be directed by David Wain and co-written by Wain and Michael Showalter – the same core creative team behind the original film and First Day of Camp.
Wet Hot American Summer was a commercial and critical flop upon its initial release, despite featuring a cast of future stars (Bradley Cooper, Paul Rudd, Amy Poehler, Elizabeth Banks) and comedy heavyweights (Michael Ian Black, Janeane Garofalo, H. Jon Benjamin). But the movie’s fan base steadily grew over the years, and Netflix provided an ideal outlet for Wain and Showalter to re-explore the characters in a different format.
“Netflix became a medium that would run thing that weren’t quite a TV series, but not quite a feature film,” Wain said last year. “It was the perfect wide canvas for us.”
The writer-director also said he was interested in a future sequel. “When the dust settles, we’ll think about whether there’s more to do on it … I think this world is somehow just endlessly interesting to me. Summer camp was a true defining experience in my own personal life, and so I’m not surprised that their tends to be more places to go there.”
Make it your beeswax to be there.
