Rob Reiner breaks the news to Richard Herring

A sequel to This Is Spinal Tap will start filming next year, director Rob Reiner has revealed. 

‘We’re going to start shooting in the end of February and everybody is back,’ he told Richard Herring on his RHLSTP podcast.

He also revealed that Paul McCartney, Elton John, Garth Brooks and ‘a few other surprises’ would be making cameos in the new comedy.

It comes 40 years after the release of the original cult classic, which starred Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer as members of the fictional heavy metal band Spinal Tap and Reiner as documentary-maker Marty DiBergi, charting their American tour. 

Reiner also spoke of how audiences initially didn’t understand the mockumentary format of the film,

He told Herring: ‘When we first previewed it, we previewed it in a theatre in Dallas, Texas. And the people, they didn't know what the heck they were looking at. 

‘They came up to me afterwards and said, "I don't understand why would you make a movie about a band that nobody's ever heard of, and they're so bad? Why would you do that?" And they said, "you should make a movie about the Beatles or the Rolling Stones."

‘I said, "Well, it's a satire". I tried to explain it. But over the years, people got it.’

He previously said he had held back on making a Spinal Tap sequel despite fans always asking for one, ‘until we came up with the right idea how to do this’.

‘You don’t want to just do it, to do it. You want to honour the first one and push it a little further with the story,’ he told Deadline last year.

Reiner was primarily on Herring’s show to promote his own ten- part podcast, Who Killed JFK?

Published: 28 Nov 2023