Arnold Schwarzenegger Reveals Why Twins Sequel Isn’t Moving Forward

Jason Reitman may be a critically-acclaimed filmmaker who has spent the last few years tending to his father’s legacy by making new Ghostbusters movies…but he apparently doesn’t have the same reverence for all of Ivan Reitman’s properties. At the time of the elder Reitman’s passing in early 2022, he was developing a sequel to Twins, the 1988 comedy in which superstars Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito played a pair of brothers, grown in a government lab and separated at birth, who reunite decades later. The movie was an outsized hit, grossing more than $200 million against a budget of just $18 million.

The Twins sequel, which was reportedly called Triplets and hoped to recruit Eddie Murphy as a third brother, is now apparently not going to happen. In a recent interview, Schwarzenegger was pretty candid that the project stalled because Jason Reitman just wasn’t interested in pursuing it.

“Jason Reitman f—ed it up!” Schwarzenegger told The Hollywood Reporter. “Jason Reitman literally stopped the project when his father died. His father wanted to do it really badly. I wanted to do it really badly. Danny DeVito wanted to do it really badly. We had the financing. When his father passed away, Jason says, ‘I never liked the idea,’ and put a hold on it. I’m developing another movie with Danny; he’s so much fun to work with and so talented.”

That may sound a lot more harsh than you are used to hearing from Schwazenegger, whose interviews tend to be very upbeat and positive. In this particular interview, the actor is candid about a wide-range of topics, leading to surprisingly frank revelations about the state of Triplets and a long-planned legacy sequel to Conan the Barbarian, which also seems unlikely to see the light of day. He also drops a bunch of those F-bombs on himself, using “f—ed up” to reference a number of mistakes small and large by himself and others. So it may not be quite as damning as it sounds at first.

As an aside if anyone is hung up on the details, since the original premise of Twins was that a government lab was trying to grow the perfect man, there’s no reason to say they couldn’t have a brother who wasn’t white. It’s also why the “triplet” could be more than a decade younger than Schwarzenegger and DeVito.

It isn’t immediately clear whether whatever project Schwarzenegger and DeVito are developing (assuming it happens) will also incorporate Murphy, or whether that was more of an Ivan Reitman thing.

What do you think about the apparent end of the road for Triplets? Sound off in the comments or hit up @russburlingame on most social media platforms to talk about all things ’80s.