With Hollywood constantly digging to the bottom of someone else’s barrel, we are going to see the raving success of a french film get remade here on this side of the pond.
Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis, and its phenomenal success in its homeland — 20 million tickets represents nearly one-third of the country’s population — has brought Hollywood a-knockin’ for remake rights.
Warner Bros. and Will Smith’s Overbook Entertainment have bought the rights, according to both The Hollywood Reporter and Variety, with Smith and partner James Lassiter set to produce the remake. The French film is a comedy about a post office clerk reassigned from his cushy Southern France office to a branch in the northern boonies where the locals speak an incomprehensible dialect.
This film is utterly HUGE in France and it fits the fish out of water comedy routine people seem to eat up at the box office, so it makes sense that they would try to remake it here in hopes of getting even a sliver of the success it did in France.
With such diverse accents all across the continental United States, I wonder just where the main character will be from, and where he will end up. Will the Postal worker have to deal with some insane exaggerated southern drawl, some New England slang? Mid western? With Hollywood American as the standard accent of choice to assume all Americans speak, the potential for comedy at the expense of some accent somewhere is ready for the picking.
Perhaps if Will Smith decides to star in it himself, he will be a suburban black man who gets moved to a heavy slang urban center? Would be great to see everyone BUT Will sayin “Hell Naw!”
