Harold & Kumar was one of the biggest indie comedy breakout hits of the 2000s, catapulting two Asian actors (John Cho and Kal Penn) into the limelight as the sort of new faces we hadn’t seen as franchise leads before. The Harold & Kumar Trilogy – Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (2004), Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (2008), and A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas (2011) – seems like it is the rare one that Hollywood doesn’t try to extend further – but could that assumption be wrong?
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ComicBook.com got to sit down with John Cho and The Hangover’s Ken Jeong to talk about their latest project together, Season 2 of the Apple TV+ series The Afterparty. During the interview, our own Chris Killian had to follow up with John Cho on comments that his Harold & Kumar co-star Kal Penn made, suggesting Harold & Kumar 4 could get going if only because the 20th anniversary of the first film is approaching:
“As far I know we haven’t gotten our act together making Harold & Kumar 4,” Cho admitted. “But yeah that would be fun.”
When Kal Penn spoke to ComicBook.com last fall, he jokingly tried to conceive what a fourth Harold & Kumar would even look like:
“Well, if it’s Christmas-wise they’ve probably smoked a little bit, maybe eating some turkey and Brussels sprouts. You know, doing their thing. But they also had kids in the third one, right? So they’re probably doing it the way that only they do,” Penn said. “I hesitate even answering that question because all of us want to do a fourth movie, we just need to figure out the right timing. You’ve got the 20-year anniversary coming up, so maybe we can figure out something by then.”
Indeed, A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas was all about the titular stoners having to come to grips with live and growing up, and how it spells an end to their crazy misadventures. The film ended with both boys finding a middle-ground balance: Harold (Cho) loosened up a bit and started smoking weed again, despite being a successful businessman and expecting father; Kumar decided to get a bit more serious, endeavoring to finally become a doctor while expecting his own child with his love Vanessa.
To be fair, the modern turn of cannabis becoming widely legalized is a fairly good hook for a new Harold & Kumar movie. Whether the pair try to open their own dispensary, or simply take a bag of weed-related goodies (much stronger than what they’re used to) on a wild dual family trip weekend, it doesn’t seem like this one would be too hard to crack out.
Make they just need to ‘get their act together,’ as John Cho says.
The Afterparty Season 2 streams on Apple TV+.
