Jamie Foxx’s long-shelved feature directing effort “All-Star Weekend” won’t be seeing the light of day anytime soon, according to the actor.
Foxx stars opposite Jeremy Piven as two best friends who win tickets to the NBA All-Star game. Yet their travel plans get derailed due to a group of outrageous characters, including Robert Downey Jr. as a Mexican man and Foxx playing multiple roles including, allegedly, a racist, white police officer. “All-Star Weekend” was filmed in 2016 and also stars Benicio del Toro, Gerard Butler, and Eva Longoria.
“It’s been tough with the lay of the land when it comes to comedy,” Foxx told CinemaBlend about any upcoming release plans for the film while promoting vampire hunting Netflix film “Day Shift.” “We’re trying to break open the sensitive corners where people go back to laughing again. We hope to keep them laughing and run them right into ‘All-Star Weekend’ because we were definitely going for it.”
Foxx previously told Joe Rogan in a 2017 interview that he reached out to MCU alum Downey after his race-swapped turn in “Tropic Thunder.”
“I called Robert, I said, ‘I need you to play a Mexican,’” Foxx recalled. “I said, ‘Shit, you played the Black dude [in ‘Tropic Thunder’] and you killed that shit.’ We got to be able to do characters.”
Co-star Piven said during “Get Some with Gary Owen” that Foxx is “really hard on himself” and wants the film to be “perfect” before its release. “He’s been holding onto this thing for five years,” Piven said.
Comedians like Rowan Atkinson, John Cleese, Jerrod Carmichael, and Kevin Hart have addressed the current state of comedy in the wake of cancel culture.
“It does seem to me that the job of comedy is to offend, or have the potential to offend, and it cannot be drained of that potential,” Atkinson recently said. “Every joke has a victim. That’s the definition of a joke. Someone or something or an idea is made to look ridiculous.”
Cleese added that it’s the “death of creativity” and that there are “very, very few really good comedy scripts” nowadays.
“Joker 2” director Todd Phillips previously told Vanity Fair that his move to helming dramas was due to what he feels is the death of comedy. “Go try to be funny nowadays with this woke culture,” Phillips said in 2019. “There were articles written about why comedies don’t work anymore — I’ll tell you why, because all the fucking funny guys are like, ‘Fuck this shit, because I don’t want to offend you.’”
