If you mention the name Fletch to any movie-lover, then they will have a vague idea at least that it was the name of a character played by Chevy Chase in a series of movies. However, for everyone else, it would probably only result in a blank expression. Based on the books by Gregory Mcdonald, the Fletch series is now coming back to the big screen with Confess, Fletch, which stars Jon Hamm in the title role. It seems, though, that the movie would possibly not have been made if it were not for Hamm’s desire to see through the production so much that he gave up a massive portion of his fee to fund the venture. Director Greg Mottola told UPROXX:
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“Bill Block at Miramax has been the champion of this project since the beginning. I don’t blame anything about the release of this movie on him. He’s tried everything he could try. Basically, he said, ‘Up to a certain amount of money, I can fully finance this film,’ but it was the kind of amount of money that would mean 27 days of shooting, which seemed especially challenging. So we looked for partners on the movie, and everyone passed. Everyone said, ‘I don’t know that this kind of comedy works in this day and age.’ They just had a kind of like, ‘Who’s Fletch? I don’t think anyone cares anymore.’
So, basically, what we did is Jon gave back 60 percent of his salary to the budget. I gave back some of my salary, not as much as Jon because he’s richer than me and I’ve got three kids. And we bought three more days of shooting. We got it up to 30 days in Boston and one day in Rome. And we said, f-ck it, we’re insane, we’re dumb. We’re going to make this movie. And then Miramax really supported us, creatively. They didn’t fight us on people we wanted to cast.”
Confess, Fletch Has Received Very Little Marketing
The original Fletch premiered back in 1985 and was a hit with both critics and at the box office, and Chevy Chase reprised his role as the LA Times reporter who gets himself involved in some comedic murder mystery plot lines four years later, but with much less success. Now Hamm will be taking on Chase’s role and reviving the character for a third time over three decades since his last appearance. That long hiatus meant that financing the movie proved a little tricky.
However, Confess, Fletch is now getting a small theatrical run and will be released as a VOD offering simultaneously, and even with that strategy unlikely to pull in vast amounts of earnings, it seems that a sequel is already being worked on by Mottola, who added that has been hired by Miramax to write a script based on another book in the series, Fletch’s Fortune. Whether or not we see that movie make it to the end of the line will probably depend greatly on how Confess, Fletch performs on October 28 when it hits select theaters, streams on-demand, and premieres on Showtime.
