A few says ago, the world learned something fascinating about the Edge, longtime guitarist for U2. The actor and former Conan O'Brien sidekick Andy Richter had a small role in Elf, Jon Favreau's 2003 Christmas classic, and he co-wrote the new book Elf Unwrapped: Behind The Scenes Of A Modern Christmas Classic. During a couple of interviews to promote the book, Richter claimed that the Edge had written an Elf sequel and that he took his movie idea to Shauna Robertson, one of the film's producers.
Richter told the Daily Beast's Obsessed podcast, "It was all about the evil South Pole elves kidnapping Santa or something like that." Sadly, the studios did not fast-track the Edge's Elf sequel, so it'll have to sit right next to Nick Cave's Gladiator sequel in the "unproduced scripts that exist, somehow" file. But fortunately, Richter broke this news during a U2 album rollout, which means that the Edge now has to answer questions about his potential Elf 2.
Today, U2's new album Carnaval De Luz is out in the world. As a result, the band sat down with broadcast journalist Anthony Mason (not the former NBA player) for this weekend's episode of CBS Sunday Morning. The episode hasn't aired yet, but CBS had to share the Edge's confirmation of the Elf story ahead of time.
When Mason asked Edge about his Elf sequel script, Edge calmly replied, "It's an outrage for someone to suggest that I would write a script. I wrote a treatment — it's a different thing — for my own amusement, yes." The best part of this is that Edge's U2 bandmates apparently had no idea about this Elf thing. They all thought it was pretty funny.
Apparently, this is something that the Edge sometimes does. He gets movie ideas, and he writes them down: "This happened to me about three or four times. I will wake up, and I will have a complete movie outline in my head. This morning, I woke up with this idea in my head for a sequel to Elf." He aded that he thinks the original Elf is "incredible."
But Edge didn't just write this treatment for his "own personal amusement." He also took it to Shauna Robertson and set a meeting: "I talked to a friend who's a film producer... I think I just shared it with a couple of people. Honestly, I thought it was so far-fetched that I didn't take it terribly seriously. But you never know."
The timeline of the Edge's screenwriting ambitions aren't quite clear from the interview, but he might've written his treatment during COVID. (He doesn't comment on what it was about, so "South Pole elves" is all we knew.) If Edge did write it around 2020, even if his potential screenplay had been rushed into production, it wouldn't have come out until Elf was more than 20 years old and many of its stars were dead. So that's one potential issue with the Edge's Elf sequel. But like the man says, you never know. Many amateur screenwriters have movie-sequel ideas, but most of them aren't in one of the biggest bands of all time. If you're the Edge, you can get someone on the phone.
You can see this riveting exchange for yourself below.
