Deadline is reporting that Will Ferrell will produce and star in a comedy based on Guy Lawson's The New York Times Magazine article "Ice Pack: An Insurance Salesman and a Doctor Walk Into a Bar, and End Up at the North Pole.” If the name sounds familiar, it's probably because director Todd Phillips' new film WAR DOGS starring Jonah Hill and Miles Teller is also based on an article by Lawson.
Sony Pictures and Temple Hill producers Wyck Godfrey and Marty Bowen will build the movie around Ferrell, which will tell the true story of a group of guys from Minnesota who decided to ride snowmobiles to the North Pole in 1968 after a night of drinking.
The expedition was led by Ralph Plaisted, an insurance salesman who with his doctor friend Art Aufderhiede teamed with local Honda dealer Walter Pederson (they needed a mechanic for the snowmobiles) and geography teacher Jerry Pitzel (the navigator who initially had the group going the wrong way) and an athletic French Canadian named Jean Luc Bombardier. They got sponsors for whiskey, designer watches and the dehydrated food used by the Apollo program. Even though they failed a psychological stress test administered by a local college and were spurned by the National Geographic Society (which was protective of the 1909 Robert Peary expedition it had backed), the small group gathered their whiskey and snowmobiles and made it to a base camp on the precipice of a frozen Arctic Ocean.
The site says the plan is "to make a buddy comedy in the vein of Wild Hogs and City Slickers," but hopefully the film will be more like the latter than the former.
Ferrell was most recently seen in ZOOLANDER 2, and his upcoming movies include James Franco's ZEROVILLE and Andrew Jay Cohen's THE HOUSE.