‘Spaceballs 2’ Will Be First Movie for Rick Moranis in 30 Years
As the sequel to There’s Mel in the sneak peek, looking spry in his Spaceballs: The Sweatshirt outfit.
While performing at Brooks’ age is a crazy accomplishment, we’ve seen him continue to act in recent years on shows like the return of Rick Moranis as Dark Helmet.
Moranis, one of the most successful comedy actors of the 1980s thanks to films like Ghostbusters and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, hasn’t been seen on the big screen since 1996’s Big Bully with Tom Arnold. (He did a direct-to-video Honey, I Shrunk the Kids sequel in 1997.)
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The actor began phasing out of public life after his wife, costume designer Ann Belsky, died of breast cancer in 1991. “I’m a single parent, and I just found that it was too difficult to manage to raise my kids and to do the traveling involved in making movies,” he told USA Today in 2005. “So I took a little bit of a break.”
That “little bit of a break” became a much more extended hiatus after Moranis discovered “that I really didn’t miss it.” When he was offered a chance to be in the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot, he turned it down. “I hope it’s terrific, he told The Hollywood Reporter. “But it just makes no sense to me. Why would I do just one day of shooting on something I did 30 years ago?”
But Moranis wasn’t done with acting, despite only doing the occasional voice-over job over the past 30 years. “I’m interested in anything that I would find interesting,” he said in 2015. “I still get the occasional query about a film or television role, and as soon as one comes along that piques my interest, I’ll probably do it.”
That project did come along, and weirdly, it would have been a collaboration with Josh Gad, one of the creatives behind the new Spaceballs movie. Shrunk would have seen Moranis reprising his role as Wayne Szalinski from the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids movies; Gad would have played Moranis’ grown-up son. The comedy was about to begin filming when the pandemic threw a monkey wrench into the project, which never got back on its tiny feet.
Spaceballs 2 seems like a better outlet for Moranis’ comedy talents anyway. Welcome back, Rick — we’re glad this dim Mint Mobile commercial won’t be your only on-screen appearance of the century.
