Bobby Farrelly says he and his brother Peter are turning There's Something About Mary into a Broadway musical, with the longtime project now moving toward a possible debut as soon as next year. The filmmaker said on Wednesday that the adaptation has been in development for a while and that the pair are working through ideas for songs and staging.
“We’ve taken our story, There’s Something About Mary, and we’re working together trying to adapt it as a Broadway musical,” Farrelly said, adding that the brothers have “a lot of ideas about songs and things like that.” He said Broadway musicals take a long time to make and hoped the show might arrive “maybe by next year.”
The 1998 film became a huge hit, grossing $369 million at the box office against a reported $23 million budget and earning a Certified Fresh score of 84% on Rotten Tomatoes. Ben Stiller stars as Ted Stroehmann, opposite Cameron Diaz as Mary Jensen, in a cast that also includes Matt Dillon, Lee Evans, Chris Elliott, Lin Shaye, Jeffrey Tambor, Markie Post and Sarah Silverman.
The new effort comes 28 years later for a title that helped define the Farrelly brothers’ brand of broad, physical comedy after earlier films such as Dumb and Dumber and Kingpin. Farrelly said the genre has changed since then, with comedy films made less often now and usually on smaller budgets. “You’re lucky to get enough money to even make a comedy, because the studios really don’t support them like they used to,” he said.
That shift helps explain why the brothers are taking their time, even as they keep the project moving. Musicals on Broadway are expensive, complicated and slow to build, and Farrelly’s comments suggest the team wants the stage version to find its own rhythm rather than rush a property that still has plenty of pull. For fans of Stiller’s breakout-era comedy, the next chapter now looks less like a nostalgia exercise and more like the rare big-screen-to-stage gamble that could still land if the songs do their job.
