How Come The Boondocks Saints Director Troy Duffy Don't Make No More New Movies?
Every couple of years I re-watch the 2003 documentary Overnight. It’s one of my all-time favorites and one of the reasons I am going to write a massive book about every American movie about American movies.
Overnight chronicles, with pitch-black humor and no small amount of morbid fascination, the rise and fall of Troy Duffy, who was plucked from obscurity by Harvey Weinstein and given a fifteen million dollar budget for his debut film, The Boondock Saints.
To sweeten the deal, Weinstein even offered to buy the bar where Duffy wrote The Boondock Saints and co-run it with Duffy, because what could be better than working with Harvey Weinstein or Troy Duffy?
Every time I rewatch Overnight I wonder anew why the world is not filled with The Boondocks Saints content, other than, you know, The Boondock Saints being a terrible movie with no cultural or creative value whatsoever.
In Overnight, Duffy is delusionally confident in The Boondock Saints’ potential. The deeply satisfying Schadenfreude of Overnight consequently comes from the knowledge that Duffy will fail spectacular in multiple fields.
The Boondock Saints went more or less direct to video, the Jeff “Skunk” Baxter-produced debut album of Duffy’s band (also called The Boondocks Saints) sold 609 copies and got the group dropped.
The Boondock Saints failed theatrically but proved a massive hit on home video. The same is true of its 2009 sequel The Boondocks Saints II: All Saints Day, which grossed over fifty million dollars on home video.
That makes me wonder why The Boondock Saints’ wildly lucrative sequel wasn’t followed by another and another and another.
Alternately, why haven’t we been subjected to a streaming series rooted in the Boondock Saints universe? Duffy spends the entirety of Overnight trying and failing to convince the universe of the commercial feasibility of The Boondock Saints.
Now that that viability has been proven repeatedly why doesn’t Duffy spend his whole creative existence playing happily in that blood-splattered universe?
I love to write. More than that, I NEED to write to stay regulated. So I err on the side of assuming that every writer loves to write and does so freely and enjoyably. I also desperately want/need money and attention so I assume that those are also more or less universal desires.
So I can’t imagine a world where Troy Duffy does not want to achieve the success he apparently considers his birthright by cranking out a shit ton of The Boondock Saints content for a fuck ton of money.
It’s not like Duffy’s fans are discriminating. On the contrary, they’ll hungrily devour anything Duffy has to vomit forth. If he were to to make NFTs of the Boondock Saints peeing on a crude caricature of “Sleepy” Joe Biden over the phrase “Let’s Go Brandon!" he’d make millions in minutes.
The same goes for The Boondocks Saints III. If he were to do a campaign to raise money for it it’d make a fortune instantly.
So why has it taken well over a decade for a third entry in the series? According to star Norman Reedus, it was for a very good reason. Or rather a very, very, very good reason. When asked about the hold-up, he explained cryptically, “It takes a very dear place in our heart, so I hope everybody realizes that when we say at this point we are not going to have anything to do with Boondock Saints III, it’s for a very, very, very good reason. It would take something monumental for us to make that decision. There was something that we think is very unfortunate, but we wish the best in all aspects. But sometimes there are things that you can’t turn a blind eye to, and I’ll leave it at that.”
It sounds to me like the hold up might be that Troy Duffy is a horrible person and a nightmare to work with and also ultimately not a good writer or director.
When you're as famous for being a monster as you are for making extremely popular b-movies it is perhaps not surprising that people don't necessarily want to get into business with you.
Duffy hasn’t completely disappeared, however. In 2020 he scored a co-screenwriting credit on Guest House, a Pauly Shore vehicle that got a zero score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Perhaps that’s a project that speaks to Duffy’s creative soul more than more Saints. Heck, it’s even possible that Duffy isn’t exploiting the popularity of The Boondock Saints more because deep down he knows the films are worthless.
Nah, that can’t be it!
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