Even though “Role Models” was a surprising box office hit, and turned a healthy profit for Universal Pictures, David Wain hasn’t been in a rush to follow up but it appears he’s now got his eyes on his next comedy vehicle.
Pajiba’s The Hollywood Cog is reporting that Wain is circling an adaptation of Alex Robinson’s graphic novel, “Too Cool To Be Forgotten.” The concept, sort of a cross between “Freaky Friday” and “Hot Tub Time Machine,” follows Andrew Wicks who goes to see a hypnotist to quit smoking only to wake up in high school in 1985. Here’s the full book synopsis from Publishers Weekly:
Robinson (Box Office Poison, Tricked) returns with his latest, a high-concept graphic novella. In 2010, mild-mannered software engineer Andrew Wicks goes to a hypnotist to quit smoking, but wakes up from his trance to find himself in high school in 1985. While the Peggy Sue Quits Smoking premise could have been disastrous, with this slim volume, Robinson cements his reputation as a master cartoonist. The art is exceptional. His characters are all visually distinct, with subtle facial expressions and body language. He uses layout and even lettering to establish mood and keep the reader firmly fixed through complicated shifts in time, place and perception. Two sequences—the initial hypnosis scene and a later confrontation between two characters—are bravura performances, using innovative but still clear ways of depicting complicated inner monologues. Unfortunately, while Robinson has mastered the graphic, his skill with the novel lags behind, with some wordy dialogue and occasional narrative clunkers: one piece of foreshadowing is so clumsy it reads better as a typographical error. When Robinson the writer catches up with Robinson the artist, watch out. Even with its flaws, this is still a master class in graphic storytelling.
It certainly is an intriguing concept, and with producer Anthony Bregman (“Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind,” “Synecdoche, New York”) behind the film, its ambitions will certainly go a bit further than wringing laughs out of old ’80s stereotypes.
While there are no details on a cast yet, speaking with MTV last year Bregman did have some ideas, saying “one way is to age up someone like Michael Cera and set him loose as the younger version. The other way is to take someone like Owen Wilson or Vince Vaughn and not really young them down, but put them in the younger person’s clothes and work off the comedy of having an older person’s psychology in an a younger person’s situation. It really depends on the director’s take on the story.”
Certainly, Wain’s stable of players runs deep (Paul Rudd, Ken Marino, Michael Ian Black etc) and if he does come on board, he would most likely take a run at the script as well. We think Wain is a solid and often underrated choice and we’re curious to see where this would go with him at the helm.
