Rob Reiner, wife Michele Singer Reiner and their three children appeared all smiles at the premiere of Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, just three months before Rob and Michele’s deaths.
The acclaimed director was supported by his family — including the couple’s three kids, Jake, Nick and Romy — on September 9 at the Los Angeles premiere of the long-awaited This Is Spinal Tap sequel at the Egyptian Theatre.
In pictures from the event, Rob, clad in a black blazer and a Spinal Tap shirt, was seen posing on the red carpet alongside wife Michele, sons Jake and Nick, 32, and daughter Romy. Also spotted was Maria Gilfillan, who appears to be Jake’s partner. The entire family was decked out in black, matching the filmmaker. (Rob also has an adoptive daughter, Tracy, whom he shared with his first wife, Penny Marshall.)
The happy occasion marked 41 years since the first Spinal Tap movie hit theaters in 1984.
The Spinal Tap mockumentaries follow a fictional rock group composed of Nigel Tufnell (played by Christopher Guest), David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean) and Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer). Rob also appears in the movies as documentarian Martin “Marty” DiBergi.
This Is Spinal Tap became a cult classic, but Rob avoided a sequel for many years.
“We never planned to do a sequel ever,” Rob told Variety in July 2025. “For years, people would say, ‘You have to make a sequel!’ and we always said, ‘Nah, nah, we’ve done it — let it be.’”
After Shearer sued the license owners of the original film and won the rights back, the stars began contemplating a sequel.
“At first, we thought no, the bar is too high. But then we met a couple of times and an idea started to percolate, and it came from a very natural place: The fact that [the Spinal Tap band members] hadn’t played with each other for 15 years, that became a story point, and the fact that [actor] Tony Hendra, who played their manager Ian Faith, had passed away,” Rob said. “We said, well, what if their manager’s daughter inherited a contract that calls for one more concert?”
He added, “That didn’t seem valuable at first because they hadn’t played in 15 years — but we remembered that Kate Bush had a song that was on Stranger Things, and all of a sudden there was a reemergence of that song and her. Well, what if a famous musician or someone starts screwing around with a Spinal Tap song, somebody catches it on an iPhone and puts it up on TikTok, it goes viral, and all of a sudden they become relevant again? So with all of those things together, we came up with this idea.”
Spinal Tap II: The End Continues was released by Bleecker Street on September 12, just over three months before Rob and his wife were found dead inside their Brentwood, Los Angeles home on Sunday, December 14.
TMZ reported on Sunday that Rob, 78, and Michele “suffered lacerations consistent with a knife.”
“It is with profound sorrow that we announce the tragic passing of Michele and Rob Reiner,” a spokesperson for the Reiner family said in a statement to Variety. “We are heartbroken by this sudden loss, and we ask for privacy during this unbelievably difficult time.”
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