'Anchorman 2' Will See The News Team Facing Late '70s Diversity

After years of speculation, Paramount and the producers of Anchorman finally came to terms that will allow a sequel to go forward. We know the core News Team will be back in action: Will Ferrell, Steve Carell, Paul Rudd, and David Koechner, with Adam McKay co-writing and directing and Judd Apatow producing. We don't know the details about Christina Applegate returning, but McKay did recently say that one of the elements of the still-developing script could be a custody battle.

That custody battle would be fitting for a film set in the late '70s, when issues related to divorce were being discussed more openly and frequently than in the past. But there are other timely story elements that will be incorporated into the script as well. Look for the characters to be forced to confront the further evolution of the newsroom as a workplace, with new personalities and ideas challenging the old working methods.

Director and co-writer Adam McKay told Empire,

We know these guys never deal well with change, and the good thing is that there's a big blast of change coming, according to the regular timeline. We're going to be throwing a lot of innovation at them, and they're not going to handle it well.

Some of that innovation will come in the form of 24-hour news coverage, which in our own history debuted in June 1980 with the launch of CNN. McKay suggests that will hit a bit earlier in the Anchorman timeline, along with new hiring practices:

It's right when all the news started changing with the 24-hours news cycle in '78 or '79. All of a sudden, local news stations diversified and had Latino anchors and African-American anchors, and any time you're talking about diversity and the Action News team, that's always fun to deal with.

That's all along the lines of what McKay had said not too long ago when explaining some of the financial machinations that allowed the sequel to move forward. But now we've got just a bit more detail. And part of the news team's reaction to the new diversity will play out in the form of an encore gang fight, for which McKay says there are already a couple ideas.