Bottoms up! Comedian and filmmaker Chris Rock is getting behind the camera for a remake of Thomas Vinterberg’s Oscar-winning film Another Round. Appian Way and Makeready are producing for Fifth Season. Meanwhile, Jennifer Davisson and Leonardo DiCaprio produce through Appian Way, with Brad Weston and Collin Creighton producing for Makeready. The project has a script written by Stuart Bloomberg, but the draft will get a rewrite from Rock and a co-writer.
Released in 2020, Vinterberg’s Another Round stars Mads Mikkelsen, Thomas Bo Larsen, Magnus Millang, and Lars Ranthe as four high-school teachers who consume alcohol daily to see how it affects their social and professional lives.
Emerging from the shadow of the Oscar slap heard around the world, Rock’s next project is King: A Life, a cinematic biopic centering on the life and times of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Universal optioned the rights to adapt Jonathan Eig’s page-turning biography King: A Life. Rock is in final talks to direct, with Steven Spielberg executive producing.
Here is a synopsis for Eig’s novel via Amazon:
Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.―and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself. He casts fresh light on the King family’s origins as well as MLK’s complex relationships with his wife, father, and fellow activists. King reveals a minister wrestling with his own human frailties and dark moods, a citizen hunted by his own government, and a man determined to fight for justice even if it proved to be a fight to the death.
As he follows MLK from the classroom to the pulpit to the streets of Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis, Eig dramatically re-creates the journey of a man who recast American race relations and became our only modern-day founding father―as well as the nation’s most mourned martyr.
In this landmark biography, Eig gives us an MLK for our times: a deep thinker, a brilliant strategist, and a committed radical who led one of history’s greatest movements, and whose demands for racial and economic justice remain as urgent today as they were in his lifetime.
Rock will team up with Universal Pictures for the MLK project. Amblin Partners produces with Kristie Macosko Krieger and Rock.
What changes do you think Rock will make to the script? Who would you like to see star in the Another Round remake? Let us know in the comments section below.