The Visitors is broadcast this evening on TF1, the opportunity to ask the question: is a 4th episode possible?
Do we still have to present Les Visiteurs, a great classic whose replicas we still quote by heart? With 13.7 million admissions in 1993, the feature film carried by Christian Clavier and Jean Reno is one of the biggest successes of French comedy.
The sequel, Les Couloirs du temps, attracted 8 million spectators in 1998. As for Visitors La Révolution, the third opus released in 2016, it attracted 2.2 million fans. If this late sequel was not a triumph, it was still a success.
Obviously, this result at the box office was not significant enough for Jean-Marie Poiré to return for the 4th film. However, is it possible that Godefroy de Montmirail and Jacquouille la rascal can one day return to the cinema?
In 2018, the director was not very optimistic about such an eventuality. “I don’t know if there will be a Visitors 4. I would have been very keen. The Visitors 3, which was still a success contrary to what many people said, also did not do the Visitor score 2”he told BFM TV at the CinéComédies festival in Lille.
“I read a lot of nonsense in the press about the fact that we had lost money. The feature film is a very good business, because it is a very well produced film as well. But for setting up a Visitors 4, it becomes difficult, because cinema is above all an economy, an industry. The artistic part is a pot shot (laughs)”he concluded.
A 4th opus of the adventures of Jacquouille and Montmirail is therefore not in the cards for the moment. Moreover, aren’t Jean Reno, 73, and Christian Clavier, 69, too old for this “bullshit”, as Murtaugh would say in Lethal Weapon?
Be that as it may, Jean-Marie Poiré, aged 76, does not seem very inclined to come out of retirement to film the jokes of the medieval tandem. Fun fact: He was back behind the camera for Les Visiteurs 3 more than 14 years after his last film, My wife is called Maurice, released in 2002.
Why not a possible reboot with a new, younger and more modern team? It will definitely happen in the next few years! By the troupe of Philippe Lacheau? By Franck Gastambide? Palmashow?
How about a TV series? At the end of 2016, there was talk of a project of this kind via Gaumont Television France, which had announced this to our colleagues from Media +.
“We have a few iconic films that we are working on to turn them into series. I am thinking in particular of The Visitors. We are at the writing stage. know if they are interested or not”, Gaumont had indicated.
Obviously, the project fell through.
Christian Clavier: “There are lots of eras that I would love to experience, and Les Visiteurs allows us that.”