Thanks to projects like Wayne’s World and Coneheads, the ’90s saw virtually every star of Saturday Night Live getting to star in their own movies. Such projects weren’t limited to adaptations of popular sketches, as Mike Myers would lead Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery while Adam Sandler scored one hit after another with Billy Madison, The Wedding Singer, and Waterboy. Tommy Boy and Black Sheep also made the on-screen duo of Chris Farley and David Spade one of the more beloved comedic pairings of all time. There are not many comedies from 2001 with a 9% Rotten Tomatoes score that are still spawning new projects 25 years later, but Spade’s Joe Dirt is apparently one of them. It turned a modest profit on release and seems to have developed into a real cult favorite in the years since. As the film approaches its 25th anniversary, a follow-up animated series titled Joe Dirt is now in development at Fox (via Deadline).

Columbia Pictures

David Spade is set to voice the title character and to serve as an executive producer. Spade has already had a fairly visible year in 2026. In April, he co-wrote and starred in the buddy comedy Busboys with Theo Von. His Fly on the Wall podcast with Dana Carvey also remains one of the more durable comedy podcasts around. On top of all that, he appears to be circling back to the character that has probably defined his film career more than any other. Joe is now envisioned as 25 years older, married to Brandy, and raising three teenage daughters. The mullet and the optimism are still apparently intact, but the problems in his life have grown beyond anything a mop and bucket can handle. Letting the character age rather than freezing him in 2001 feels like the smart move, since a middle-aged Joe Dirt dealing with fatherhood gives the writers somewhere slightly new to go. Spade executive produces alongside Fred Wolf, his co-writer on the original film, as well as Eric Gairdner, Doug Robinson, and Lauren Moffat of Doug Robinson Productions.

Gairdner may be the most intriguing variable here, since his résumé suggests a somewhat sharper comedic sensibility than the property might seem to require. He created Moonbeam City for Comedy Central, wrote for Fox’s HouseBroken, and executive-produced Kyle Mooney’s gleefully strange Saturday Morning All Star Hits! for Netflix. Moonbeam City in particular had a stylish, oddball energy, while Saturday Morning All Star Hits! traded in the kind of affectionate lowbrow nostalgia that a Joe Dirt revival will probably need. Promising as that may sound, this is still a development deal, not a series order, and a previous 2010 TBS attempt is a reminder that an animated Joe Dirt has stalled out before. That said, the franchise did find a second life elsewhere, and in a fairly notable way.

Spade and Wolf co-wrote Joe Dirt 2: Beautiful Loser, which premiered on Sony’s Crackle in 2015. So this animated continuation is technically the third serious attempt to extend the property, and the second effort to animate it. The broader point may simply be that Fox has spent years positioning itself as a broadcast home for adult animation, and revisiting a known Sony property with at least some built-in audience recognition probably counts as a relatively low-risk way to keep that pipeline stocked.