New 'Major League,' 'Ace Ventura' Movies Could Be Coming Soon

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Morgan Creek Productions, a studio that produced 78 films between 1988 and 2011, is planning to sell the rights to its entire library. But there are five properties that the studio is planning to retain remake rights for: Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Major League, Young Guns, Flying Tigers and The Exorcist. And those rights could very well be exercised; according to The Hollywood Reporter, Morgan Creek is considering all five “as future new productions.”

Before you bemoan Hollywood’s seemingly infinite thirst for recycling the same known brands, it’s worth noting that three of those titles have seen various reincarnations since the release of their originals.

After 1994’s Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, which helped turn Jim Carrey into a star, there was not only the 1995 sequel Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, but an animated series that ran on CBS from 1995-1997 (and was relaunched for a third season on Nickelodeon from 1999-2000) as well as a 2009 TV movie called Ace Ventura: Pet Detective Jr. that passed on the badge to the wise-cracking sleuth’s son, played by Josh Flitter. According to a 2003 press release issued around a partnership between Morgan Creek and Universal Studios, they were at least at one point developing a sequel called Ace Ventura: Return of the Pet Detective.

The 1989 baseball hit Major League spawned two far less popular sequels, 1994’s Major League II and 1998’s Major League: Back to the Minors. While II returned most of the roster, only a couple of the film’s major players, Corbin Bernsen and Dennis Haysbert, came back for the third. David S. Ward, who directed the first two Major League movies, told Yahoo Sports last year that a script for a new sequel was written and that he was actively trying to get it produced. He refers to it as Major League 3, explaining that Back to the Minors was “not a Major League movie … I don’t know what the hell that was.”

Though Morgan Creek didn’t produce the classic horror film The Exorcist (1973) or its first sequel, The Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), the studio owns the series rights and is responsible for the last three entries in the franchise: 1990’s The Exorcist III (1990) and the original trilogy’s two prequels, Exorcist: The Beginning (2004) and Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist (2005).

Young Guns was Morgan Creek’s very first release in 1988, and the studio followed with the 1990 sequel, Young Guns II. But we haven’t anything about a third film or reboot, and neither has Emilio Estevez. So that could be one of the more surprising announcements forthcoming.

The least known property among those as mentioned as Morgan Creek’s new productions is Flying Tigers, which the studio has been trying to get off the ground for the better part of this century (the film is not related to the 1942 John Wayne movie of the same name). In 2001, director Les Mayfield (Encino Man, Blue Streak) was hired to helm the World War II epic, about volunteer fighter pilots who helped China fend off Japanese attacks two years before Pearl Harbor, but that project never went into production and disappeared from Morgan Creek’s slate. Action filmmaker John Woo was also at one point attached to a separate Flying Tigers film, and in 2013 it was announced Ron Shelton and Walt Becker would be directing a 10-part TV miniseries on the pilots.