This Was Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Pitch For ‘BASEketball 2’
Trey Parker and Matt Stone don’t seem to be terribly proud of their 1998 comedy BASEketball. Which is weird, considering that it arguably predicted the future of professional sports. They even wrote a South Park scene in which Stan revealed that he hated his creators' movie so much that he insisted on getting a refund.
But despite this apparent antipathy towards the David Zucker-directed flick, Parker and Stone once came up with a plan for a BASEketball sequel. Or, at least, a trailer for one.
Back in 2009, Stone guested on Bill Simmons’ podcast The B.S. Report, and it wasn’t long before the topic of BASEketball came up. The host called it “underrated,” and Stone pointed out that their friend Bill Hader, a one-time South Park writer, was also a defender of the movie. At one point, when Stone was hanging out with Hader, a fan jokingly told him, “You owe me 8 bucks… I want my money back for BASEketball.”
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“Hader got right in this guy’s face, he’s like, ‘Hey man, BASEketball’s a sweet movie,’” Stone recalled. “Bill has arguments with me and Trey about why BASEketball’s a sweet movie, and we’re like, ‘No, it’s not a sweet movie.’”
Stone also admitted that he and his partner came up with the idea to make a real trailer for a fake sequel to the box office bomb. “Trey and I have been talking about doing BASEketball 2,” he explained. “We’ve been talking about putting a bunch of money together and just shooting a sweet trailer that looks like a Michael Bay movie.”
The bogus trailer would have opened like some ridiculous Hollywood blockbuster, starting with the discovery of a nuclear weapon in “Morocco or some non-descript Arab country.” And there would be a bunch of cliché action shots like “Dian (Bachar) crying (and) Trey hugging him, with an explosion going off as he’s hugging him.”
“We just do this huge, huge intro to a massive movie,” Stone continued. “It’s just like Foreign Intrigue, times five. And it has nothing to do with BASEketball at all, except for (Bachar is) in it, Trey’s in it, I’m in it. Really we just want to do the trailer and pay for it to be in movie theaters.”
“You’ve waited 20 years. Here it is. Finally,” he added in the style of the movie trailer voice guy.
Sadly, Parker and Stone never actually made the project, leaving all the questions we had about the original BASEketball unanswered.