Screen Gems Has an Interesting Opportunity with Their ‘About Last Night…’ Remake

By  · Published on August 10th, 2012

According to Deadline Hollywood, Steve Pink (Accepted, Hot Tub Time Machine) is in talks to direct a remake of About Last Night… which will take the original David Mamet play’s title as its own. So, in all fairness, Sexual Perversity in Chicago isn’t so much a remake as it is a second adaptation of the Mamet play. Only 237 more to go before he reaches Shakespeare status.

The movie, written by Leslye Headland (Bachelorette), has Michael Ealy and Kevin Hart set to co-star and Regina Hall rumored for a third role. The production is still looking for the second female lead.

Here’s where I go out on a limb, so hear me out.

The studious will notice that all three acting talents involved are 1) great at what they do and 2) all African-American. Thus, Screen Gems has a unique opportunity here, and I sincerely hope that they will not bury this project with niche-only marketing that hits the Tyler Perry sweet spot without reaching out organically to a broad base. Yes, I see the irony in me pointing out the obvious in order to ask Screen Gems not to point out the obvious, but there’s no reason they shouldn’t give the kind of advertising money necessary to treat this like anything other than a standard romantic dramedy. Except, you know, history.

It’s being produced by Will Gluck (the director behind Friends With Benefits and Easy A) and Will Packer (who earned a ton of success with Ealy and Hart in Think Like a Man). That movie scored a lot of money, but it never got out of its niche. Unfortunately, there’s a Hollywood Math version of reality that claims that if all the leads of a movie are black than it’s a “black movie” (as opposed to say, all the “white movies” out there), but Screen Gems has something here that can greatly challenge that unproven thinking, and it would be encouraging to see them do it. Put it in more than 2,000 theaters. Give it a full court press in the advertising. Go big and then go home with a lot of money.

In other news, Kevin Hart is in everything now, right?

Movie stuff at VanityFair, Thrillist, IndieWire, Film School Rejects, and The Broken Projector Podcast@brokenprojector | Writing short stories at Adventitious.