Universal has reportedly paid $42.5 million to win the heated bidding war for worldwide rights to Bruno, Sacha Baron Cohen's follow-up to Borat, which opens Friday.

According to reports, Universal's price (which could have bought the entirety of Staines, Ali G's hometown) managed to edge out competition from other interested studios including Dreamworks, Sony, Warner Bros., and 20th Century Fox, and will cover the film's estimated budget, said to be in the range of $20-25 million.

For those of you not familiar with Bruno, he's another character played by the uber-talented Sacha Baron Cohen (Da Ali G Show): a flamboyant Austrian fashionista/reporter who jet sets between the runway shows of New York (watch out, Tim Gunn) and the nightclubs of Miami (that goes for you too, Uli), and, um, the American Deep South, usually annoying the hell out of anyone he meets and managing to nearly get himself killed. The film, like its predecessor Borat, will showcase the Bruno character, who was introduced on HBO and Channel 4's Da Ali G Show.

It's extremely disconcerting that Universal would pony out this kind of dosh, given that Cohen's Borat doesn't even open theatrically until this week. (Sidebar: I attended a screening of Borat last week and have to say that for the first 3/4 of the film, my face hurt from laughing so much, but in the end it does go way too far overboard and ends up collapsing on itself with a painfully extended sequence. You'll know which one I mean when you see it.)

I worry for the fate of such an expensive endeavor, especially when Bruno is a feature adaptation of an even more culty TV series character than Borat that is light-years away from attaining the kind of awareness that the Kazakh reporter had. Especially since 20th Century Fox, which is distributing Borat, scaled back that very theatrical release to a mere 800 screens, due to concerns that "the movie wasn't registering high enough in awareness tracking," according to the Hollywood Reporter.

Ouch. Or, as Bruno himself might say, "Ich don't think so."

Has Universal made a shrewd investment in a future mega-hit ... or overpaid for what will be a whimper instead of a bang? Only time will tell. In the meantime, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan hits theatres nationwide this Friday.

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Jace is an LA-based television development and acquisitions junior exec who watches way too much television for his own good and would love a TiVo for every room in the house. (He’s halfway there.) His blog, Televisionary, can be found at televisionary.blogspot.com.

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