A Career Move Now Known As ‘Doing A Wahlberg’
It feels like only a few weeks since we were expressing bafflement at the success of the career of Keanu-esque golem Channing Tatum, who’s already worked with Michael Mann, Steven Soderbergh and Kevin Macdonald, and been praised by the likes of Nicolas Winding Refn. So we won’t dwell on it here. Instead, we’d like to praise the guy for a second, because, like fellow heartthrobs Joseph Gordon-Levitt and James Franco, you can certainly say that it’s hard to predict the actor’s next move.
Of late, he’s taken roles in Ron Howard‘s rom-com “The Dilemma,” Soderbergh’s actioner “Haywire,” the romantic drama “The Vow” and the cop drama “Son Of No-One,” and he’s allegedly attached to Randall Wallace‘s period espionage romance “Love and Honor” — a fairly ambitious and diverse slate for someone with no discernible talents.
Now Deadline brings news that Tatum’s attached to another promising project: Sony‘s reboot of “21 Jump Street,” the TV show that launched Johnny Depp to stardom. The plot involves a team of youthful-looking cops who go undercover in a high school, and Jonah Hill‘s been attached to star in a script by “Scott Pilgrim” writer Michael Bacall for a while now, with the directors of the excellent “Cloudy With Chance of Meatballs,” Phil Lord and Chris Miller, joining the project earlier in the year.
The actor would play one of the lead cops alongside Hill if he signs on — the studio have been testing a number of young leading men, but apparently Tatum played best opposite Hill. What’s unclear is if Emma Stone is still on board: the fast-rising starlet was reported to be circling the female lead in September, but signing on to “Spider-Man” presented a potential schedule conflict, although there’s been some speculation that the delay in the film‘s release date, to March 2012, was to accommodate Stone. But there’s no mention of her in the Deadline piece, suggesting she may have moved on: rumors have pegged “Footloose” remake star Julianne Hough for a role of some kind in the picture.
Still, the comic potential in the premise is rife (Bacall described the R-rated comedy as “John Hughes meets “Bad Boys,” and as about “a couple of dudes who haven’t quite worked out their emotional issues with high school who are returning to high school”). It’s a very promising creative team, and, while we’re not quite sold on Tatum, we can see the promise in the pairing of him and Hill. We’ll find out when the picture hits theaters on March 16th, 2012.
