Sixteen years ago in 1999, a high school-set update of My Fair Lady outgrossed everyone's expectations at the box office. She's All That was made for a modest budget of $10 million and went on to gross over $100 million. Of course a movie with that kind of success is getting a remake. The powers that be in Hollywood look at those types of numbers and salivate.
Per TheWrap, The Weinstein Company and Miramax, which produced the original film, are developing a new version of She's All That with director Kenny Leon and producer Tonya Lewis Lee (an industry executive who's also married to Spike Lee). "The remake will follow a similar premise and is expected to be developed with diverse leads in mind," TheWrap reports.
Of course, we all remember and have much love for the original. Zack Syler (Freddie Prinze, Jr.) was the star athlete whose biggest problem was that his dad wanted him to go to Dartmouth, but he had been accepted to almost every Ivy League school. His girlfriend Taylor Vaughn (Jodi Lyn O'Keefe), one of the best high school villains in movie history, came back from spring break and dumped him for Brock Hudson (Matthew Lillard), a ridiculous cast member from The Real World.
Enter into this equation the bet from master manipulator Dean Sampson (Paul Walker) that Zack turn walking disaster Laney Boggs (Rachel Leigh Cook) — who had glasses AND a ponytail...clearly it was an insurmountable feat — into the prom queen, and movie magic was made.
I could go on for days about this movie, especially because it just gets more ridiculous and campier when you rewatch it today. There's a performance art showcase that ends with Zack having a personal epiphany with a hackey sack. Usher was the campus radio host/DJ who acted as an omniscient narrator/Greek chorus and also introduced the school full of professional dancers to Fatboy Slim's "The Rockafeller Skank" at the prom. Peak 1999, achieved.
Freddie Prinze, Jr. has already tweeted about the news. When a fan wrote to him saying, "You know, just Hollywood running out of ideas one more time. But what's new?," he responded, "tough for writers with original scripts."
The most important question is how can someone ever recreate this? (TheWrap)
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