Not long after Tara Reid pitched the internet on making a Josie and the Pussycats sequel, co-star Rosario Dawson checked in on Twitter with a “Yas! Let’s get the band back together!” That’s likely pretty exciting for fans of the 2001 Archie Comics adaptation, which bombed at the box office before becoming a cult classic in the years since. Reid and Dawson starred alongside Rachael Leigh Cook as the titular band, facing off against a pair of over-the-top villains played by indie film icons Parker Posey and Alan Cumming, and supporting actors Missi Pyle, Paulo Costanzo, and Gabriel Mann.
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In 2021, I had the opportunity to speak with several members of the Josie and the Pussycats cast and crew for the film’s 20th anniversary. Some of it has never come to light until now, and so here’s a look at how some of Reid’s co-stars would want to tackle a Josie and the Pussycats sequel:
“A lot of [the movie] was focused on the artists, and was focused on the industry, and the different players they’re in, and kind of watching the masses, how they reacted,” Rosario Dawson told me in 2021, suggesting that a follow-up should center on the consumer side. “It would be interesting to see how much smarter everyone has become on the consumer side of things to what’s happening, and maybe center them more in the conversation [in a sequel]. That’s what’s happening with the Free Britney movement; you can’t just say that the media has the right to do something, because people will consume it. Now the consumer is saying, ‘We don’t want this. We want better.’ So what does that do? Maybe something like that could be really interesting….I think it would be interesting to kind of see what the world looks like 20 years later that these girls are inhabiting.”
“I’m actually really intrigued about going back to things 20 years on, 25 years on,” co-star Alan Cumming told me. “I think it would be hilarious to do. It would be hilarious to do a parody of the fact that the film didn’t find its audience the first time round, and maybe they should make it again with the girls at the age they are now. I think there’s something there. There’s something fun about the fact that it didn’t find its audience, and so now they’re having another go at it.”
“What would I want Alexander to be doing? I don’t know. I would want him to still be trying to be a manager, unsuccessfully, but acting as if he was successful — you know, hiding the fact that he’s in a little shitty office somewhere,” Paulo Costanzo told me. “And I’d want Josie to like come back and like enlist him, and him to pretend like, ‘Well, I’m not sure if I need that right now because I have a lot of successful…yes, I’ll do it. I’ll do it.’”
“I would like to go back…It would be fun to do it, especially at this age,” Missi Pyle said. “It’s 20-some years later. Where is Josie now?…I think they should still be the Pussycats. Who doesn’t want to see 40-something Josie and the Pussycats? It would be really fun! Why are they still going for it?”
The movie was released in early 2001 to baffled reviews and an indifferent audience, but has gone on in the intervening years to become a cult classic. Writer-directors Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan, who have turned to TV since Josie came out, actually pitched a follow-up to the movie a few years ago — albeit one without Josie or the Pussycats. The prospective follow-up would have centered on DuJour, a boy band that featured Donald Faison, Alexander Martin, Seth Green, and Breckin Meyer, in a twenty-year-later reunion tour. They reportedly pitched it to Netflix with Green and Meyer attached, but it stalled.
“I think they should re-pitch it,” music legend Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds said in a 2021 book about the film. “I think that there’ll be another time for that. I especially think that with an older group coming back now, there’s something that could be funny in it, and fun as well. Maybe it’s their kids that are getting into it or something. But it should be looked at. I’d be down for it. I can think of running into Seth Green and Breckin Meyer, and they were like, ‘We really need to do it again. We need to do that group.’ They really wanted to follow up on this group.”
In 2021, and apparently unrelated, Faison said on his Fake Doctors, Real Friends podcast that he would love to do a DuJour reunion. They got to do it, briefly, in an episode of Robot Chicken last year.
“That would be a good movie to come out — the DuJour reunion,” Faison said in his podcast interview. “Backstreet’s going on tour, New Edition’s goign on tour, all these major bands from back int he day are going on tour. DuJour should go on tour and see if they can rekindle the light that they had when they were popular in Riverdale.”
The idea of a sequel to Josie and the Pussycats feels like a pipe dream — but it’s a fun idea, and one that the cast is clearly still passionate about 20 years later. And, let’s be honest: most of us would never have thought that Bill and Ted Face the Music or Zack Snyder’s Justice League would actually come to pass after years trapped in limbo and/or development hell. So there’s always a shot.
Have you seen Josie and the Pussycats? Sound off in the comments, or hit me up at @russburlingame on Twitter to talk about all things Josie.
