Justin Lin shares Space Jam 2 update: 'We're getting closer every day'

Fast & Furious director Justin Lin may be accustomed to working at 100 mph, but he’s making sure to take his time on Space Jam 2.

Last May, EW confirmed Lin and LeBron James had jumped on board for the sequel to the hit 1996 film, which teamed up Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny to save the Looney Tunes from alien captors. Yet, since the news broke, there hasn’t been much revealed about the progress of the follow-up, until Lin spoke to IGN on Tuesday.

Sharing that he asked Warner Bros. “for a playground and the time to really explore [the possibilities of a sequel],” he added that scheduling has proved tough considering his star and other potential stars (“Everybody’s volunteering to be in the movie”) are professional athletes with a limited offseason.

“I’ve been really wanting to push that genre but to do that you need the right amount of time,” he said. “So there’s a logistical challenge, but also creatively to do a sequel 20 years later with a new cast. I feel like I’ve gone done nine different iterations already and we’re going to keep going, but we’re getting closer every day.”

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One person who surely won’t be surprised by the challenges of crafting the sequel is Space Jam director Joe Pytka. When talking to EW in November for the film’s 20th anniversary, the filmmaker said he couldn’t see how a new movie could work.

“I think it’s ridiculous to try and make a different movie out of it,” he opined. “I can’t see it. I can’t imagine how it could be what that film was. Not that Space Jam is a great movie, but it had something that touched that period of time because of who those athletes were and it doesn’t exist anymore.”