Seth Rogen Explains Why They Never Made Pineapple Express 2

The 2008 stoner action movie Pineapple Express made more than $100 million at the global box office against a budget of around $25 million, but Sony never decided to make a sequel. Seth Rogen, who starred in the film and also co-wrote the script, has now explained why.

He said on The Howard Stern Show that he has tried over the years to make a sequel, but Sony never agreed to finance it due to the producers asking for more money.

"We tried to make one. Thanks to the Sony hack, you could actually find the email when Sony decided to kill the movie and not make it. It was something we were very open to several years ago, but Sony was not that interested in it," Rogen said.

Rogen said he and his team "probably wanted too much money" for the sequel. The first movie was a huge success commercially, because it was made on such a relatively small budget, but the costs would have increased for the sequel, and Sony apparently wasn't keen on this.

"We made the first one and no one got paid anything and that's why it was a $25 million movie [to make]," Rogen said. "That's why it became highly, highly, highly profitable. It was made really cheaply, especially for an action movie. Studios, they don't like giving away money."

The "weed movie" genre is a tough one, Rogen said, because some people in Hollywood don't believe it's viable.

"It's a tough genre, I will say," Rogen said. "When we made Pineapple Express, there were not a lot of great weed movies. As we would tell people we were making a weed action movie, they would look at us like we were so f**king stupid and crazy."

Rogen wrote Pineapple Express with his longtime writer partner Evan Goldberg. The film was directed by David Gordon Greene, who went on to direct the new Halloween movie in 2018.

Pineapple Express featured a lot of other big names, including James Franco, Danny McBride, Gary Cole, Kevin Corrigan, Craig Robinson, Rosie Perez, Ken Jeong, Amber Heard, Joe Lo Truglio, and Bill Hader.

The movie follows the characters played by Rogen and Franco who witness a murder and then get caught up in an absurd story involving too many hijinks to list here.

Sony trolled fans in 2013 when it released a trailer for "Pineapple Express 2" that actually turned out to be an April Fools prank that was a promo for This Is The End. You can watch that video above--it's the closest thing to a sequel we may ever get.