Jack Black to Collaborate With the Farrelly Brothers on a Christmas Comedy That Can’t Be Worse Than ‘Shallow Hal’

Shallow Hal-heads rejoice — Jack Black and the Farrelly brothers are getting the band back together.

Two decades after Black and the Farrellys brought audiences a box-office success that would age about as well as W. Earl Brown playing a mentally disabled character in There’s Something About Mary, the Shallow Hal heavy hitters are making their second film together. The Farrelly-directed, Black-starred Shallow Hal spiritual successor will be a holiday comedy titled Dear Santa about a young boy who accidentally addresses his Christmas wishes to Satan instead of Santa.

This sounds like something a young JB would do in an episode of Tenacious D — only JB would accidentally send a Satan letter to Santa.

Black’s Super Mario Bros. Movie co-star Keegan-Michael Key will also appear in Dear Santa, though neither Key nor Black’s parts in the project have been revealed. The plot of Dear Santa sounds similar to a 2020 Syfy original movie called Letters to Satan Claus in which a young girl accidentally summons the biblical villain with the same typo, a grisly mistake that haunts her decades later. That coincidence might be because the Santa/Satan spelling similarity has been the fodder for memes and jokes since the dawn of the internet.

Twenty years ago, the Black/Farrelly partnership was an artistic low point for all the creatives involved. Shallow Hal’s story was about as skin-deep as its protagonists’ perception of women — Black played a misogynistic, wannabe womanizer who is hypnotized by self-help speaker Tony Robbins into only seeing a person’s inner beauty. He then falls in love with a 300-pound woman played by Gwyneth Paltrow, and wacky misadventures ensue. Despite the attempt at appearing as a well-meaning comedy about superficiality, the entire film was just a single extended fat joke. As we’ve previously established, Shallow Hal was “the worst thing Gwyneth Paltrow has ever done, and that’s saying a lot.”

Now, the trio are attempting a second collaboration for the holiday comedy crowd. Despite Dear Santa’s simple premise, we hesitantly expect it to be the best of their two joint projects — and if it falls short, we’ll ask Santa and Satan both for something to burn it out of our memories.