We’ve been holding out hope for a while that Bruce Campbell would reprise his role as the supernatural threat-fighting Elvis Presley from 2002’s Bubba Ho-Tep, but it doesn’t sound like it’s going to happen.
Writer/director Don Coscarelli has been trying to get a prequel made for a while, Bubba Nosferatu: Curse of the She Vampires, but he has been unable to convince Campbell to board the project. Now, in an interview with EW, the 59-year-old actor has confirmed that there’s no way he’ll be playing Elvis again.
“I killed it,” Campbell said of his potential role in the project. “I killed it for me. I told the creators that I didn’t want to dance around it anymore. I feel that the first one was a nice little gem and you don’t have to make a sequel for everything. Don Coscarelli, God bless him, go make it. You know, get somebody else. They had Ron Perlman at one point. Knock yourself out. I don’t want to stop you from making this, but I don’t want to [do it]. So, that one I’m just going to let go.”
While we’re definitely disappointed to hear that Campbell won’t be returning for another Bubba movie, we kind of get where he’s coming from. Most of the overdue sequels to cult films that have been produced lately just aren’t that good, and only end up tarnishing the reputation of the original. So for Campbell to want to preserve the integrity of the original film is kind of admirable. So since it looks like we’re not getting another Bubba Ho-Tep film, at least not one with Campbell, you can still at least read the new prequel book, Bubba and the Cosmic Blood-Suckers, which available for pre-order in stores now.
