Spinal Tap II: The End Continues

If you were to ask a movie fan to guess the 1980s film getting a direct sequel in 2025, how many guesses would they need to arrive at the right answer? Given unlimited guesses, there are lots you could come up with. Franchises that have already been recently revived to fanfare, like Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop, and Ghostbusters. Incorrect. Movies whose reputations are forever entwined with blissful childhood nostalgia that would give them that coveted multi-generational appeal, like The Goonies and Back to the Future. Solid guesses but still no dice.

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The right answer is This Is Spinal Tap and that’s still a question that will stump most because Spinal Tap II: The End Continues came out of left field and then landed with a silent thud, grossing just $2.5 million and seemingly closing after just two weeks in nearly 2,000 theaters.

Such an extraordinary miscalculation of audience demand seems both tragic and astonishing, considering that the original 1984 rock band mockumentary has been heralded as a comedy classic for decades.

In a world of varied tastes and viral hot takes, the first Spinal Tap seems to inspire just two types of reactions: like and love. Many people fall in the latter class, which is partly why the movie has enjoyed enduring relevance and recognition far beyond a typical comedy movie’s shelf life. By any measure of a film’s afterlife, Spinal Tap has to be classified as a success. It made it into the Criterion Collection on Laserdisc and DVD back in the ’90s when that hallowed boutique line’s spine numbers were still in the double digits. It was selected for preservation by the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry in 2002. No musician of any distinction has had a disparaging word towards the film. The fictional band even evolved into a real one that released new music and repeatedly performed live.

Spinal Tap II brings back all four of the key creative personnel: writers-stars Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, and Rob Reiner. Reiner, the film’s real director (the original was his potent directorial debut), plays the film’s fictional documentarian Marty DeBirgi. The other three are Spinal Tap, a once-iconic heavy metal band that broke up fifteen years ago and has not kept in touch. DeBirgi documents the group’s reunion concert, as they learn they are contractually obligated to give one final performance to Hope Faith (Kerry Godliman), who has inherited the band from its original manager, her late father Ian.

Amidst their professional estrangement, Tap’s members have kept a low-profile. Lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel (Guest) owns a cheese and guitar shop in Berwick-upon-Tweed. Lead singer David St. Hubbins (McKean) has gotten into writing instrumental scores for true crime podcasts as well as phone hold music. Bass guitarist Derek Smalls (Shearer) curates a museum dedicated entirely to glue.

The sequel mostly just revels in catching up with these eccentric characters and letting the actors, who first brought them to life back in a 1979 ABC sketch series pilot that was not picked up, improvise and banter yet again. The four leads are all in their late 70s or early 80s now and while quite seasoned on both sides of the camera, they’ve grown somewhat scarce in recent years. That makes it something of a thrill to — literally and metaphorically — get the band back together. And it also makes it heartbreaking that nobody seemed to care.

Admittedly, this is the nature of moviegoing in 2025. Hollywood has stopped making movies for older adults and older adults, in turn, have stopped going to see movies. The global pandemic saw the industry push audiences towards streaming and nearly five years since theaters reopened, the audience numbers are still not where they were pre-COVID. Assuming the R rating was enforced, in order to see the original Spinal Tap in theaters without a parent or guardian, you would have had to have been born in 1967 or earlier. That means you turn 58 this year and presumably much of the fanbase of the film and band is closer in age to the people who made it: 70s and 80s. Sadly, Hollywood stopped caring about all of you a while ago.

That is one reason to explain this sequel’s commercial failure. Another is that distributor Bleecker Street has not ever mastered the business side of exhibition. The studio opened in 2015 with a market share of 0.20%. Ten years later, that figure has climbed all the way up to 0.22%. Bleecker Street’s all-time highest grossing film remains Logan Lucky, which brought in $28 million domestically late in the summer of 2017. On paper, Spinal Tap II seemed to have the potential to do that kind of business or more. The original film made $5.7 M in 1984, which inflation adjusts to $18.2 M today. But it is a movie that found its audience over time. It’s hard to imagine this sequel dying such an ignoble commercial death had it come back in the ’90s or early 2000s.

The worst thing about the disappointment is that Spinal Tap II does not deserve it. I hold more like than love for the original film, for by the time I was old enough to appreciate it, the concert documentary was out of fashion and mockumentaries were no longer new or novel. But this sequel is absolutely not a big step down from the beloved predecessor. The cast is ancient and so are their guest collaborators, the most notable of whom are Paul McCartney and Elton John. But they’ve still got their comic chops in tune, having honed and employed them so many times in the decades since the first film.

Guest has made a career out of fake documentaries (a term he prefers to the portmanteau that Reiner popularized), having directed and co-written esteemed films like Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind, and For Your Consideration. Shearer has lent his voice to 21 characters on “The Simpsons”, having turned up in all but a few of that institution’s jaw-dropping 795 episodes to date. Reiner got his start as the voice of the hippie generation on “All in the Family”, but smoothly transitioned to filmmaking, having directed such triumphs as Stand by Me, The Princess Bride, Misery, and A Few Good Men. McKean is as versatile and prolific as anyone in the business. His epic resume has gone in so many different directions in the half-century career that began with “Laverne & Shirley” and extends to “Better Call Saul.”

With such legacies among them, one wishes Spinal Tap II was more of a crowning achievement. It is a slight film, running just 83 minutes with scenes through the end of the end credits. That’s still one minute longer than its predecessor ran, although it was edited down from an epic length, something made clear by the 4.5-hour workprint cut of the film that surfaced online earlier this century and continues to be widely circulated by fans. The sequel’s laughs are somewhat mild and a bunch of them are callbacks with the feel of an aging band playing the old hits. But honestly, that’s what the fans want here and Reiner shows more restraint in the nostalgia department than Netflix’s far more widely seen, nontheatrical Happy Gilmore 2 recently did.

Spinal Tap II hits Blu-ray, DVD, and 4K Ultra HD Steelbook next Tuesday. This review looks at Bleecker Street’s barebones Blu-ray edition.

BLU-RAY DISC SPECIFICATIONS:
1.85:1 Widescreen
DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (English), DTS-HD MA 2.0 (Descriptive Video Service)
Subtitles: English for Hearing Impaired, Spanish
Release Date: November 11, 2025
Single-sided, single-layered disc (BD-25)
Blue Keepcase in Cardboard Slipcover

VIDEO and AUDIO

The passage of 41 years all but ensures that Spinal Tap II looks remarkably different from the original Spinal Tap. While that one had the filmic look of The Last Waltz and other concert docs of the day, this one looks like a modern-day documentary: spotless digital perfection. The 5.1 DTS-HD master audio mix is lively and the sterile 1.85:1 visuals leave us wanting nothing.

BONUS FEATURES, MENUS, PACKAGING and DESIGN

The Blu-ray opens with an unappetizing trailer for Fackham Hall and that is all we get in the way of extras here. That is pretty shocking considering how much was assembled for various releases of the original film, whose rights Bleecker Street acquired when they bought this sequel. Maybe they have bigger plans down the line, but with Criterion having just revisited the original, I’m not sure what more there is for Bleecker to do.

The menu loops a montage of clips set to “Big Bottom.”

The standard Blu-ray case slides into a slipcover that merely reproduces the artwork below in plain cardboard form.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

A barebones release of an epic box office fail, Spinal Tap II does not inspire the heartiest of recommendations. And yet, this mistimed sequel has its charms and chuckles and enough of both to hate seeing it met with a shrug. If you’re in the group that loves the original film, you’re going to end up seeing this one way or another and I don’t think you’ll be greatly disappointed. It may not be the franchise’s must-have release of 2025 on the heels of Criterion’s recent 4K and Blu-ray releases of the original, but it also wasn’t something you merely dreamed up.

Buy Spinal Tap II: The End Continues from Amazon.com:
Blu-ray · 4K Ultra HD Steelbook · DVD · Prime Video

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