Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar filmmaker Josh Greenbaum has received the opportunity of a lifetime by signing on to direct a potential comedy classic starring three of the funniest men in comedy history.
Tuesday morning, Deadline reports that Universal Pictures has greenlit Strays directed by Greenbaum and starring Jamie Foxx, Will Ferrell, and Will Forte.
A live-action-CGI hybrid adult-skewing comedy written by American Vandal Dan Perrault, Strays follows an abandoned dog who teams up with other strays to get revenge on his former owner. Ferrell is the abandoned dog while Foxx is one of the pooches who befriends him. Forte is the nasty human owner. The movie shot in the fall and now heads into post-production. The canine characters are being created via visual effects.
The project has a kennel’s worth of producers. Erik Feig’s Picturestart initially developed it then approached Greenbaum and Louis Leterrier as well as Phil Lord and Chris Miller. All are now acting as producers as well as Lord Miller president of film, Aditya Sood.
Universal picked up Strays from Picturestart and Lord Miller in a preemptive situation earlier this year. The project falls under Lord Miller’s first-look with Universal.
Jessica Switch is executive producing and Julia Hammer is co-producing for Picturestart. Nikki Baida will executive produce for Lord Miller. Senior vp of production development Jeyun Munford and director of development Tony Ducret will oversee for the studio.
Ferrell is now starring in The Shrink Next Door, an Apple TV mini-series that adapts the true-crime psychological drama podcast. The triple threat, who via his company Gloria Sanchez Productions produced Barb and Star, next star in Apple’s upcoming Christmas-themed musical film Spirited opposite Ryan Reynolds.
Foxx, who voiced the lead in Pixar’s Oscar-winning Soul, will next be seen in Spider-Man: No Way Home. He has two projects in the can: They Cloned Tyrone, with John Boyega, as well as Day Shift. opposite Dave Franco, both of which will hit Netflix next year. His memoir, Act Like You Got Some Sense, was released in October.
Forte was most recently seen in the streaming series Flipped, and was heard as the voice of characters in Scoob! and The Willoughbys. He lent his voice to Lord and Miller’s Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and The Lego Movie (the latter also featuring the voicework of Ferrell as well). He is developing MacGruber as a series, which would also reunite original castmates Kristin Wiig and Ryan Philippe, as a series for Peacock.
