With the duo of Nicholas Stoller and Jason Segel scoring big with “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” looking to have a family hit on their hands with “The Muppets” and likely to find big success next spring with “The Five-Year Engagement,” Sony is eager to jump on their bandwagon.
Back this summer they picked up the Kate Angelo-penned spec script “Sex Tape,” and now Deadline report that Sony are in talks with Stoller to direct, eyeing Segel and Reese Witherspoon for the leads. The story itself is almost exactly like “Date Night,” but with a naughty twist, following a married couple who take a night off from their kids and decide to spice up their lives by making a sex tape. But when they wake up the next morning from their night of amateur porno making, they tape is gone and they have to track it down. So sort of like finding that USB thingy, but instead of documents, there are dongs and boobs.
The pairing of Segel and Witherspoon could be interesting, but honestly, we don’t see either Stoller or Segel getting involved unless they get to rewrite the script. And while we’ve been waiting for Witherspoon to make something as smart and sharp as “Election” for years, that’s probably not gonna happen. Or least not as long as she keeps picking projects like “This Means War.”
So chalk it up as a maybe for now, but after “The Muppets” hits it big, Stoller and Segel will likely have even more doors open for them for stuff they’ve come up with themselves, and we’d think they might be more eager to go down their own path rather than pick up someone else’s ball and run with it.
