Pamela and Liam living it up in London

There are a number of comedy sequels this year, including Happy Gilmore 2, Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, and The Naked Gun. We are varying degrees of nervous for all these films, as the originals are all beloved comedy classics, and comedy sequels are hard to get right. 

So much of comedy is timing, so much is chemistry, you can’t MAKE a great comedy film happen, and a lot of the ones that become classics start off as failures (like Zoolander, Idiocracy, Walk Hard, Wet Hot American Summer, Office Space, Hot Rod, Popstar—honestly, sometimes it seems like the best comedies fail at the box office as a matter of course). 

The Naked Gun comes out in a couple weeks, and besides rooting for a comedy sequel to succeed, we’re also rooting for Pamela Anderson and her continued comeback. The film premiered in London yesterday and Pam was there, looking radiant in purple.

The dress design is sort of whatever, but the fit and the COLOR are great.

Her co-star, Liam Neeson, was also on hand, and they look like they had a lot of fun working together.

Are we shipping this? SHOULD we ship it? Liam Neeson has stated on the record that he’s “past all that” when it comes to romance (his wife, Natasha Richardson, passed away following a skiing accident in 2009). But they’re cute together! It probably is a product of working well together, maybe bolstered by being proud of the film they made. Neeson has been leaning all the way into the goofy marketing for the movie:

 

The “savecomedy.org” site directs you to buy tickets for The Naked Gun. It’s a solid bit, not least because it is, sadly, true. Theatrical comedies have been struggling for a while now, and they are getting fewer and further in between. This year’s hopes ride almost entirely on sequels, though original comedy One of Them Days did well back in January, topping $50 million. Can The Naked Gun break the comedy sequel curse?