Confess, Fletch Director Has Bad News About Sequel

Fletch’s Fortune, the planned follow-up to filmmaker Greg Mottola’s Confess, Fletch, is dead at Miramax. The filmmaker shared that management changes at the studio have led to a lack of interest in the sequel. The movie, made for around $20 million, earned less than $1 million at the box office, amid a day-and-date release on digital platforms and a quick turnaround to Showtime and Paramount+. Still, it earned rave reviews and fans of Gregory McDonald’s acerbic investigative reporter have been holding out hope that it performed well enough on home video platforms to earn a follow-up. Mottola had already started work on the script.

Bill Block, a producer on the first movie, was “really loyal” to Mottola’s take, but he’s no longer with Miramax, and that studio holds the rights to the Fletch franchise. According to Mottola, losing Block was the nail in the movie’s coffin.

“The new head of Miramax, who controls the rights to all the books, shot down my sequel project. The Fletch curse got me,” Mottola said on social media (via Dark Horizons). “The gatekeepers don’t see it, but I tried […] Feature comedy is having a rough time. I was okay with the idea of it probably being a streaming movie, but I was only going to do it my way. I was told ‘the first one lost money’ – as if there had been any attempt to make money. Jon [Hamm] was very into the new script. I’ve been rather depressed about it, but hard to expect a good break in the feature world these days.”

Confess, Fletch was a passion project for Mottola and star Jon Hamm, the latter of whom reportedly gave back a chunk of his salary to help pay for the movie.

The good news for Mottola is that he seems pretty satisfied with his current job, which is writing on the second season of James Gunn’s Peacemaker series.

Fletch’s Fortune is the third Fletch novel from author Gregory McDonald, and the second Miramax has the rights to. Due to an unusual situation with the rights, the original Fletch isn’t included in the package Miramax acquired. Mottola never said why, but presumably, those rights are still with Universal, who made a movie based on the original Fletch in 1985. Miramax also doesn’t hold the rights to the Flynn spinoff series, which is why his character had to be replaced with an original character (played by Roy Wood, Jr.) in Confess, Fletch.

The original Fletch was a huge hit, but rather than adapting one of McDonald’s novels for a second movie, Universal made Fletch Lives, an original story with minimal ties to anything in the books. That movie flopped, and it took years for Hollywood to take interest in the franchise again. The prequel novel Fletch Won was at the center of two different attempts to adapt the property in the past — one by Kevin Smith, which would have starred Jason Lee as Fletch; and one by Bill Lawrence, which would have starred Zach Braff. Neither of those takes made it out of development.