rupert murdoch Tagged Articles at Cinematical

I'm not sure how somebody could dispute his boss when that boss is Rupert Murdoch, but a spokesperson at 20th Century Fox says the News Corp. head wasn't exactly correct when he announced a sequel to Borat. According to this spokesperson, Sacha Baron Cohen isn't even committed yet, and the studio is so far only considering the idea of a sequel. Murdoch had actually claimed that Cohen already signed on, which is untrue.

But shouldn't Murdoch know what is going on? When a man so rich and powerful declares something to be true, it has to be true. Sure, there may not be any official documentation, but I can't imagine anyone telling the guy to his face that he's wrong, or that he can't have what he wants. If he wants a Borat sequel, it will be his. And maybe that spokesperson will be out of a job. It is still unclear what kind of a sequel is possible, since the Borat character is unlikely to still fool people. I think that if Murdoch really wants this to go ahead, then he should be the one to figure out what kind of direction it should go in. But don't tell him I said so.

One of the first things that new Borat fans talked about as they were walking out of the theater had to be: "I wonder if they'll make a sequel," and that probably led to the next logical question: "I wonder how they could make a sequel!" I mean, Borat's been pretty much everywhere for the past few months, which will make it a whole lot tougher to find unsuspecting people who don't recognize the character -- and if people actually recognize Borat, then there goes the joke right there.

But that's not stopping Fox from moving forward with a sequel. In a recent article in Financial Times (as mentioned at ComingSoon.net), Rupert Murdoch mentioned that after Sacha Baron Cohen does his Bruno movie for Universal, he'll be coming back to Fox to do Borat 2. Why isn't Cohen doing Bruno with Fox? Rupert says it's because Fox was unwilling to bid on a screenplay sight unseen, whereas Universal obviously was. No word yet on what direction the Borat sequel will take (hey, maybe he can visit North Korea; I doubt they know Borat out there), but considering the first flick grossed over $248 million worldwide (off a production budget of $18 million), you just knew this was coming.