Jack Black Gives School of Rock Sequel Update

Are we ever getting a School of Rock sequel? Jack Black was once again faced with that very question, as he and his Tenacious D bandmate Kyle Gass were doing a recent interview with City Babs of SiriusXM radio. It’s now been almost exactly 20 years since Jack Black scored a breakout hit role as Dewey Finn, a rock guitarist and slacker who finds purpose and passion as a substitute teacher at a prep school, where he molds his class into a rock band. 

School of Rock was a cult hit ($131 million on a $35M budget), which came along at a time when Gen Z was young and impressionable and inundated by a resurging wave of happy sing-along music-themed shows and films – whether it was School of Rock, High School Musical, or later examples like Glee, which all dominated the 2000s and early 2010s. School of Rock turned its modest box office earnings into a major branding win, spawning a franchise that includes a Broadway rock musical launched in 2015, whose music was done by greats like Andrew Lloyd Webber, Glenn Slater, and Julian Fellowes. A School of Rock TV series followed a year later in 2016 and ran for three seasons on Nickelodeon. 

But now, in an era where long-awaited direct sequels are all the rage (see: Top Gun: Maverick, Avatar: The Way of Water) how likely is it that we could finally get School of Rock 2?

Jack Black had jokes for Caity Babs when she asked whether he had plans for either School of Rock 2 or a sequel to the Tenacious D movie, saying, “Yup. Both of them. Breaking news. We’re thinking about doing both of those.” 

Gass added to the joke, saying the two sequels are being done as one project, “It’s a hybrid, ‘School of D.’

Babs explained that School of Rock had indeed had a hand in shaping an entire generation of young musicians, to which Black said “Thank you, that means a lot.” While it remains to be seen if any truth at all was in Black’s claim that School of Rock 2 is moving along, he did note his responsibility to inspire people to both rock – and NOT ROCK, if they have no actual talent: 

“We strive to inspire but we also, we also sometimes, we discourage if we feel like we tried and we’ve seen what you’ve done and we don’t think you rock you should stop rocking. We do both. We build them up and we tear them down. But thank you for noticing the good parts.”

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School of Rock is available on home video and can be rented or purchased through Amazon Prime Video or Apple TV streaming services.