Spinal Tap Is Ready For Its Encore

New York, NY (July 25, 2025)—Throw together some musicians, engineers, road crew or just music nerds (well that last one usually sums up all of the above) and sooner or later the conversation will turn to This Is Spinal Tap. The legendary 1984 mockumentary looms large in pop culture and particularly in the music biz; now, after 41 years, David St. Hubbins, Nigel Tufnel and Derek Smalls (Michael McKean, Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer) are heading back to the big screen with Spinal Tap II: The End Continues. Due to hit theaters September 12, 2025, the film’s first trailer has just been released.

It’s hard to overstate the impact of the original film, which basically invented the mockumentary. The movie followed the fictional U.K. group on a disastrous U.S. tour full of cancelled dates, staging mishaps, wrong turns backstage, accidentally obscene songs and more. Along the way, the lunkheaded band both comically and tragically disintegrated in front of the camera, before finally pulling it together at the end. While the film was a hit with critics (Siskel and Ebert gave it two thumbs up), This Is Spinal Tap only did modest box office but went on to find its audience in the years that followed, becoming a staple of tour bus lounges and midnight movie screenings everywhere.

Whether the new film can reach the inspired if subtle heights of the original remains to be seen. The 1984 movie was largely improvised—often the actors knew where a scene had to begin and end, and then made up the middle as they went along. That kind of highwire filmmaking requires not only trust in the cast but also a fair amount of luck that lightning will strike—and be caught in a bottle.

Even the original film didn’t quite pull that off initially; some will recall a four-hour rough cut that made the rounds among fans in the 1990s on bootleg VHS. I’ll admit I attempted to sit through it back then, and my main memory is that it was impossible to watch. Much of that was due to the blurriness and bad sound—the tape was an Xth generation copy. Most of the time, you couldn’t tell what was happening or being said, but what little I could pick up was disappointing. In the rough cut, the band—dumb but lovable in the final film—were mean jerks, unlikeable and unsympathetic. My only real takeaway from the experience was that I finally understood what directors meant when they said that they “found their film in the editing room,” using editing to sculpt the performances; the portrayal of the bandmembers between the two versions seemed like night and day.

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In the ensuing four decades, though, Spinal Tap has become a music industry touchstone…and a real group. While once fictional, they’ve gone on to do plenty of things that real bands do, like releasing multiple albums, going on tour and suing Vivendi and UMG for $400 million (the complicated, interrelated lawsuits were ultimately settled out of court).

Also, while the new film is called Spinal Tap II, there have actually been other sequels to the original film, such as 1992’s The Return of Spinal Tap, a forgotten, straight-to-video production comprised mostly of concert footage, as well as multiple pioneering internet shorts—2007’s Spinal Tap, produced to aid the global warming relief effort Live Earth, and 2009’s Stonehenge: ‘Tis a Magical Place, where the trio made a pilgrimage to the titular historic site.

Spinal Tap has made its presence known in the pro-audio realm as well. Longtime NAMM attendees will recall the band’s ear-whomping set in 2001 at a Shure party inside the Anaheim Hilton Ballroom; after arriving on stage in a VW Bug, the band’s loud gig accidentally shook ceiling tiles loose to fall on unsuspecting fans, much to the crowd’s delight.

More recently, in 2018, bassist Derek Smalls sat for an hour-long interview at the annual Audio Engineering Society convention in New York, promoting his solo album Smalls Change: Meditations Upon Ageing.

Still, as fun as it was to see Spinal Tap in real life, the big screen is truly where the band belongs, and it looks like Spinal Tap II will give us what we want. Bringing not only director Marty Di Bergi (Rob Reiner) but also Elton John, Paul McCartney and Questlove along for the ride, with any luck, the flick should be a lot of fun.