According to Deadline, Julia Roberts and Jennifer Aniston to team up in a Margot Robbie body-swapping comedy, Tom Ackerley and Josey McNamara’s production company Lucky Chap Entertainment. Amazon Studios’ next project will be written and directed by Palm Springs’ Max Barbakow, who pitched the film last week, the outlet reported.
Barbarow will produce alongside Lucky Chap, with Roberts’ Red Om Films and Aniston’s Echo Films, according to Deadline. Meanwhile, Barbakow is best known for running Palm Springs., the 2020 Andy Samberg-Cristin Milioti comedy won by Neon and Hulu at Sundance for a then-festival record sum. The comedy is based on an original script.
Julia Roberts, 55, is fresh off the success of his recent rom-com Ticket to Paradise, co-starring by his old friend and former on-screen collaborator, George Clooney. The film opened to $16.3 million at the domestic box office in October 2022 and has grossed a global total of nearly $170 million since its release, according to Box Office Mojo.
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Ticket to Paradise follows a feuding divorced couple, played by the Oscar-winning friends, who go to Bali to thwart the marriage of their daughter, played by Kaitlyn Dever, and reignite old feelings along the way. Although it currently has an audience score of 87% on Rotten Tomatoes, Roberts joked early on that the film would likely be “terrible.”
“It’s so funny and George is so funny and George and I together, it’s probably going to be terrible because there’s so much potential for it to be great,” the Pretty Woman actress told Variety in May. “He’ll just implode on himself.”
Meanwhile, Netflix unveiled the first trailer for Murder Mystery 2, a Paris-set sequel to the record-breaking 2019 comedy starring Aniston, 53, and Adam Sandler. Set four years after the events of the first film, this time 56-year-old Sandler and Aniston’s Nick and Audrey Spitz are full-time detectives trying to launch their own private detective agency.
When they receive a wedding invitation from a friend, the Maharaja (Adeel Akhtar) on his private island, “the Spitz are in trouble again when the groom is kidnapped for ransom shortly after the festivities begin, causing every glamorous guest, family member and the bride herself a suspect,” according to a synopsis.
Directed by Jeremy Garelick (The Wedding Ringer), the sequel also stars Jodie Turner-Smith, Mark Strong, Mélanie Laurent, John Kani, Kuhoo Verma, Enrique Arce, Zurin Villanueva, Tony Goldwyn, Annie Mumolo, and Dany Boon.
For Amazon’s Jennifer Salke and film chief Julie Rapaport, this signals a rally at Amazon to bolster its movie slate.
Amazon was in the running for the hot Sundance title Flora and Son, winning the auction for Red Shirt, a Simon Kinberg pitch that Channing Tatum will star in for director David Leitch, and before that, the Nick-directed wedding comedy. Stoller starring Reese Witherspoon and Will Ferrell.
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