The original made 40 million on an 8 million budget in the summer of ’84. It was a scrappy, raunchy, underdog comedy that caught a wave, and the wave was bigger than anyone expected. So when Leonard Goldberg took over as head of 20th Century Fox, his very first act was to greenlight a sequel. A “no brainer,” in his words, reversing the previous regime’s no-sequels policy. There was just one problem.
The guy who made the first film wanted nothing to do with it. Director Jeff Kanew was blunt: “It’s done, the nerds won. What are you going to do? Have them win again?” As a critique of the sequel, it’s kindof on the nose, because that’s literally what happens.
So Fox went looking for someone who wouldn’t ask inconvenient questions. They found a certain Joe Roth, a little known producer whose only prior directing credit was the boxing melodrama Streets of Gold in ’86. Roth got the job because the studio liked him and he had a reputation for efficiency, which is executive-speak for “he won’t make trouble and he’ll bring it in on time.” Within a year of wrapping Nerds II, Roth co-founded Morgan Creek Productions. Two years after that, he was a chairman at Fox. By 1994, he was running Walt Disney Studios. Not a bad résumé. Anyhoo.
The PG-13 rating was still a relatively new invention in 1987. The rating had been introduced in July of 1984, the exact same month the original Nerds hit theatres. By the time the sequel came around three years later, studios had figured out that PG-13 was a magic sweet spot, the rating that theoretically gave you the teen audience and the adult audience in one ticket. But for a property like this, it gave you neither. Adults who loved the original were fed an absence of everything that gave it its flavour, and the younger viewers Fox was courting had no attachment to the brand because they were too young to see the first one in any proper context.
Or, like me, they saw it way too young and our desensitised brains were looking for more than a very special vacation sitcom episode.
Anthony Edwards reportedly disliked the script and agreed to return only after his scenes were scheduled to shoot in a single day. The writers gave Gilbert a broken leg so he could film everything in one session, and be done with it. This was a contractual obligation served as a minimally viable effort for someone with Top Gun on his CV and places to be.
For the uninitiated, the sequel ships the Tri-Lambs off to a fraternity convention in Fort Lauderdale, where they’re bullied by a new set of Alpha Betas, humiliated by a nerd-hating hotel manager, and eventually triumph through the same formula of outsmarting the jocks. Bradley Whitford is the new villain and James Hong is there somewhere.
Yadda. Ogre switches sides. The nerds win again. Kanew called it. Yadda.
Stripping out the R-rated material and relocating the nerds from campus to a Fort Lauderdale hotel severed the one connection the premise had to anything resembling the original stakes. At Adams College, the nerds were fighting for a home, for legitimacy, for the right to exist in a system designed to exclude them. Problematic execution aside, that was a story with actual bones. In Florida, they’re tourists getting hassled at a convention.
The $30 million gross looked respectable enough on paper, and I’m sure Leonard Goldberg got his Chrismas bonus. The sequel led to a live-action sitcom pilot in 1991 with Robbie Rist (Cousin Oliver himself) as Booger, but it never aired. Then came Revenge of the Nerds III: The Next Generation in 1992 and Revenge of the Nerds IV: Nerds in Love in 1994, both made-for-TV movies on Fox. Each iteration got cheaper, more disposable, further from whatever spark the original had. The IP kept getting recycled at lower and lower returns until there was nothing left to squeeze.
That was always the plan, whether anyone at Fox would have said so out loud or not. The PG-13 wasn’t a creative choice, it was a business decision. You can’t build a franchise pipeline around an R-rated sex comedy. Unless you’re Police Academy who demoted itself down from R to PG-13 to PG and a cartoon. The softer rating was clearly the first step in converting a surprise hit into portable, deployable, infinitely recyclable intellectual property.
So Jeff Kanew was right. The original Revenge of the Nerds was never meant to be a franchise. It was a one-off with a throbbing pulse, a film that connected because it was raw, relatable and a little bit dangerous to watch when you were eleven and the video store clerk didn’t care. -Pop
Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise arrived on Home Video this week in 1988, after a July 10th, 1987 theatrical vacation.