With $160 million in the bank, The Muppets was a big enough hit that Disney has been working on a sequel, even if an increasingly busy Jason Segel has had to step aside from writing the script and probably won’t star either (although more about that later).

If the House Of Mouse gets its way, the follow-up could arrive as early as Summer 2013 (with family franchises, the shorter the interval between installments, the better), although writer Nick Stoller has been talking to Collider and doesn’t think that’s a possibility. He says, “They want to do it. They want it as soon as possible, which is good. I’m not sure exactly when they want to release it. I think it was something like next summer. I don’t think that’s realistic in terms of getting it all together in time. But to want to do it so quickly is great. It certainly makes us want to write it quickly. I’m writing with James Bobin. We’ve outlined it over the past couple weeks and we literally started writing it yesterday. The first 13 pages are written. It is started. It is on.”

Stoller also talks about the plot, and revealed that star Jason Segel may have a cameo in the sequel, which will be take a page from the 1981 film, The Great Muppet Caper. He says, “There’s a cameo possibility in it, definitely. Gary and Mary’s story is concluded. There’s not much to say after that for their story, but we follow them up into a…I will say, it is a caper. It is a comedy caper. It’s similar to the first one. [It] had dramatic connections to the first Muppet movie, but it was a whole new thing, hopefully. This is the same thing. We love The Great Muppet Caper. So this has some elements of that, but it’s different because it’s in the tone of what [we] like to do.”