Editorial Staff
So late last week we heard that the “Romancing the Stone” remake was still a go at Fox – and with everyone from Gerard Butler to Taylor Kitsch mooted for the Jack Colton role.
Today, Deadline says NBC is looking to do a “Romancing the Stone” TV series (assumingly without any of those tentpole drawcard names).
So what’s the deal?
I checked in with our source this morning for an update.
“Obviously there’s been a lot of movement on the project since we spoke last week”, he says, “and the brass have decided that the pilot script, which may also have served as the blueprint for the feature film, is better suited to television.”
The series will see follow ”a successful but unfulfilled woman who teams with a risk-taking adventurer to take on weekly missions while on a larger quest to find her missing brother”; the pilot script will bear Mark Friedman’s name.
And with big-time filmmaker Shawn Levy (“Night at the Museum”) expressing interest in directing the pilot, suddenly the change of medium doesn’t feel like a major dip. In fact, there’s the “possibility that it may have a better chance of success on the tube”, says our source.
Levy was apparently approached about directing the feature film remake but sparked at the idea of bringing the 1984 film to TV instead.
With studios “tightening their belts” at the moment, canceling projects left right and center, it’s likely that had NBC not shown interest in this as a series that we’d never have seen Jack Colton and Joan Wilder again. (Once Nick Jonas and Michelle Trachtenberg are announced as the leads, we may wish we hadn’t; damn shame Nathan Fillion has “Castle”, he’d been tops as a small-screen Colton).
So there you have it, the project is indeed a go – – you just won’t be able to exit half-way thru, requesting your money back if you don’t like it.
