Litres of Cola and a New Drug Ring: Super Troopers 3 Is Coming and We Are Ready

Here at The Game of Nerds, we don’t just cover the Super Troopers franchise. We live it. Two of our own writers have shown up to conventions in full Funko-style cosplay as Ramathorn and Farva, blocky proportions, Vermont State Trooper uniforms, the whole commitment, which tells you everything you need to know about what this franchise means to us. This is what happens when a film burrows into your identity, when the characters become shorthand for how you talk about the world, when the quotes come up in daily conversation without anyone even noticing anymore. So when the trailer for Super Troopers 3 dropped in April 2026, the TGON team collectively lost its mind.

The boys are back. The shenanigans are back. And if this trailer is any indication, Farva’s particular brand of chaotic energy is about to get a wedding-sized upgrade.

Super Troopers 3 arrives in theaters August 7, 2026. Here is everything you need to know.

The Trailer Breakdown: What We Know, What We Spotted, and What Has Us Screaming

When Farva’s wildly over-the-top Indian engagement to Thorny’s sister spirals into chaos, the Super Troopers must navigate Thorny’s schemes to break up the relationship, while trying to crack a pernicious new drug ring, all to save the day and maybe the wedding itself. That premise alone is the most Farva premise imaginable. Of course it’s Farva getting engaged. Of course it’s chaos. Of course there’s also somehow a drug ring involved.

The Opening: Familiar Faces, Familiar Trouble

The trailer opens exactly as any self-respecting Super Troopers trailer should: with the boys in uniform and someone doing something they absolutely should not be doing in a professional capacity. The Vermont state trooper aesthetic is intact, the chemistry between the five core cast members is immediate and electric, and it’s clear within the first thirty seconds that whatever happened in the eight years since Super Troopers 2, these guys have not learned a single lesson.

Jay Chandrasekhar returns to direct, reprising his role as Thorny, alongside Kevin Heffernan as Farva, Steve Lemme as Mac, Paul Soter as Foster, and Erik Stolhanske as Rabbit. All five are back. All five look like they’ve been waiting impatiently for this moment. The ensemble’s natural rapport, built across twenty-five years of working and performing together, is visible in every frame.

The Wedding Chaos

The trailer’s central comedic engine is exactly as unhinged as advertised. Farva, historically the franchise’s most reliably unpredictable character, is engaged and planning a wedding. The scale of the engagement party scenes in the trailer suggest Broken Lizard is swinging for something bigger and more elaborate than either previous film attempted. The Indian wedding setting is visually rich and gives the comedy troupe a new aesthetic playground that looks genuinely fun.

The dynamic of Thorny attempting to break up his sister’s relationship with Farva, and presumably failing repeatedly in increasingly catastrophic ways, is a character premise so natural it’s almost surprising the franchise took three films to get there.

The Drug Ring Subplot

Every Super Troopers film needs a legitimate law enforcement plot running under the comedy, and the third installment delivers with a new drug ring investigation. The trailer teases this thread without giving too much away, which is smart: the best Super Troopers moments are the ones you don’t see coming.

The New Cast

The cast includes Nat Faxon as Captain Todd Markowski, Chace Crawford as Baker Buchanan, and Andrew Dismukes as Coy Burns, alongside Hannah Simone, Iqbal Theba, Sakina Jaffrey, Jon Rudnitsky, and Lisa Gilroy. Crawford’s casting is a knowing wink to anyone who knows his role as the supe Neuman in The Boys, a character playing a different kind of authority figure with a very different set of powers. Dismukes, fresh from SNL, brings sketch comedy credentials that should fit the Broken Lizard energy naturally.

Brian Cox also returns as Captain John O’Hagan and Marisa Coughlan returns as Ursula Hanson. Cox’s gravel-voiced, perpetually exasperated captain is one of the franchise’s great straight-man performances, and his presence grounds the comedy in exactly the right way.

The Easter Eggs

The trailer contains several nods to the original franchise that dedicated fans will clock immediately.

The patrol car configuration and the highway setting in several shots deliberately mirror the aesthetic of the 2001 original, down to the color grading of the Vermont landscape. It’s a visual signal to longtime fans: we remember where this started.

The dynamic between Farva and the rest of the group, his self-aggrandizing delivery and the other troopers’ weary tolerance of him, is played with the same rhythms fans have memorized over twenty-five years. Lines like the syrup exchange callback and Farva’s completely unearned confidence in any situation are structural easter eggs for anyone who has spent time with the franchise.

The drug plot echoes the original film’s approach of hiding a genuine procedural beat underneath the chaos, the “meow” scene from the original famously buried a legitimate traffic stop under one of cinema’s greatest extended comedy bits, and the trailer suggests the third film is honoring that tradition.

Brian Cox’s reaction shots throughout the trailer are their own easter egg: the specific face he makes when Farva says something incomprehensible has been a franchise signature since 2001, and it remains perfectly calibrated.

The Franchise Deep Dive: From Vermont to Canada to a Wedding

Super Troopers (2001): The One That Started Everything

Part stoner comedy, part wince-inducing prank reel, and part underdog story about a group of flippant Vermont state troopers trying to save their jobs, Super Troopers first defied expectations by virtue of getting made at all.

Written by all five members of Broken Lizard and directed by Chandrasekhar, the original film follows the Vermont Highway Patrol troopers, Thorny, Farva, Mac, Foster, and Rabbit, as they battle a rival local police department for jurisdiction while accidentally uncovering a drug smuggling operation. The plot is almost beside the point. The film is really a delivery mechanism for a series of increasingly unhinged comedy bits that audiences either found hilarious or deeply baffling.

The original opens with one of the great cold opens in comedy film history: a group of stoned college kids being pulled over, with the driver desperately trying to hide drugs before the trooper arrives. The trooper, Mac, proceeds to mess with the kids’ heads in ways that escalate so far beyond the initial premise that by the time the scene ends, you have a complete understanding of exactly what kind of film you’ve signed up for.

The “meow” scene, in which Foster works the word “meow” into every sentence during a traffic stop with Jim Gaffigan, remains one of the most quoted comedy sequences of the early 2000s. Farva’s “I’ll have the spaghetti with a liter of cola” became the kind of line that fans still deploy in restaurants twenty-five years later. The syrup chugging. The snozzberries. The bear tranquilizer.

The film made $23.2 million worldwide on a modest budget, which was enough to turn a profit and establish Broken Lizard’s relationship with Fox Searchlight. But its real success came on DVD and cable, where it found the audience that would sustain the franchise for the next two decades.

Our Review: The original Super Troopers is genuinely funny in a way that rewards rewatching because the best bits are layered, there are jokes inside the jokes, character moments hidden inside what look like pure gags. It’s not trying to be anything other than exactly what it is: five comedians who wrote the movie they wanted to see, made it on their own terms, and trusted that there were enough people in the world who would get it. There are. There always were.

Super Troopers 2 (2018): The One Fans Funded Themselves

The story of Super Troopers 2‘s production is, in many ways, more interesting than the film itself, and that’s not a knock on the film.

On April 25, 2015, Broken Lizard launched an Indiegogo campaign raising $4.4 million in 30 days for production of Super Troopers 2. Over 50,000 contributors gave Broken Lizard in excess of their initial goal of $2 million. To put that in context: the initial goal was met within 48 hours. The final total was more than double the ask. Fans didn’t just want a sequel. They were willing to fund one themselves.

More than 17 years after the original, the film bucks typical comedy-sequel tradition by being a pretty funny movie. The core cast plays off each other well enough to get a laugh from even the most repetitive jokes. The sequel finds the troopers dispatched to police a region near Vermont’s northern edge that has become the subject of a border dispute between the U.S. and Canada, pitting them against a trio of Canadian Mounties and a mayor played by Rob Lowe.

The Canadian setting gave the film a fresh geographical canvas while maintaining everything fans loved about the original dynamic. The Broken Lizard troupe leaned into the cultural comedy of the U.S.-Canada relationship with cheerful enthusiasm, and the addition of Rob Lowe as a former hockey player turned brothel-owning mayor was exactly the kind of inspired casting choice the franchise needed.

Our Review: Super Troopers 2 is louder and cruder than the original and wears that as a badge of honor. Does it fully recapture the lightning-in-a-bottle quality of the 2001 film? No. Does it deliver exactly what 50,000 crowdfunding contributors paid for? Absolutely yes. It’s a generous, fan-service-aware sequel that respects its audience enough to give them more of the thing they loved rather than trying to reinvent it. For a franchise built on fan devotion, that’s the right call.

The Cult Classic Story: How a Modest Comedy Film Became a Religion

Super Troopers would have faded into obscurity, if it weren’t for the cult following it eventually gathered over the years, mostly from audiences who found the aloof and irreverent humor far more riotous than anyone did at the time of release.

The original film’s path to cult status follows a now-familiar template: modest theatrical performance, strong DVD sales, cable television ubiquity, and then the internet. The early online comedy communities of the 2000s found Super Troopers and treated it as shared cultural currency. Lines from the film circulated in forums and comment sections before meme culture had a name for what was happening. The “meow” scene became one of the first viral comedy clips of the internet era.

What made the franchise’s cult appeal so durable was the specific texture of its humor. Broken Lizard’s comedy is improvisational-feeling even when it isn’t, anarchic without being mean, and rooted in a genuine affection for the characters that prevents the pranks from ever feeling cruel. The troopers are idiots, but they’re lovable idiots who clearly love each other, and that warmth underneath the absurdity is what keeps audiences coming back.

The franchise also benefits from exceptionally quotable dialogue delivered by characters whose vocal rhythms and personalities are distinct enough to be immediately recognizable. Farva’s voice, his delivery, his particular blend of aggression and obliviousness: these are things fans can do on command. The same is true of Thorny’s measured exasperation, Mac’s enthusiasm, Foster’s romantic optimism, and Rabbit’s perpetual status as the youngest and most victimized member of the group. They are, in the deepest sense, characters rather than just comedy vehicles.

Searchlight President Matthew Greenfield captured it well when filming commenced on the third film: “Super Troopers has a way of making the absurd feel inevitable.” That’s the secret. The comedy doesn’t feel random. It feels like the logical endpoint of who these people are. And that sense of inevitability is what makes it endlessly rewatchable.

The crowdfunding campaign for Super Troopers 2 was the clearest possible demonstration of the franchise’s cult power. When a fanbase is so devoted that it will collectively fund a sequel because no studio would, that’s not a cult following anymore. That’s a community. Chandrasekhar noted that it took 21 drafts to get the original Super Troopers just right, and that level of craft is visible in the specificity of what fans fell in love with. You don’t raise $4.4 million for a movie you vaguely enjoyed. You raise it for a movie that became part of how you talk and think and process the world.

Final Thoughts: Will Super Troopers 3 Deliver?

In an era with a serious lack of raunchy comedies, Super Troopers 3 has the potential to be a welcome diversion from major tentpole films and streaming dramas. Broken Lizard is here to remind us that we can laugh, even when the world burns around us.

The trailer delivers on every promise the franchise has built over twenty-five years: the chemistry, the escalating absurdity, the characters doing things that make you question their professional licenses, and Farva doing something that should end his career but probably won’t. The new cast additions are intriguing. The wedding premise is inspired. Brian Cox’s face is still the funniest reaction shot in any given scene.

The franchise has never pretended to be more than it is: five comedians who love making each other laugh, making films for the audience that loves watching them do exactly that. There’s an honesty to that project that no amount of critical indifference has ever been able to touch.

The boys are back. We have our Funko cosplay ready. We’ll see you in Vermont.

Super Troopers 3 is in theaters August 7, 2026.

Are you ready for Super Troopers 3? What’s your favorite moment from the franchise? Drop it in the comments, and yes, “meow” is an acceptable answer.