For the first film to emerge from the four-picture deal he signed with Netflix last year, Adam Sandler appears to be ready to resurrect an idea we last heard about in 2012: The Ridiculous Six. And he’s been busy gathering actors both new and well versed in his Happy Madison style, with Taylor Lautner, Nick Nolte, musician Blake Shelton, Whitney Cummings, Steve Buscemi, Rob Schneider, Dan Aykroyd, Will Forte, Nick Swardson, Terry Crews, Jon Lovitz and Vanilla Ice all aboard.
Thanks to The Wrap’s report on the casting roll-call, we now know a little bit more about the comedy Western that Sandler is planning. He’ll be in the lead as a man who grew up an orphan raised by a Native American tribe with Lautner, Crews, Schneider and Luke Wilson as four of his half-brothers and one more still to be cast.
Nolte is set as Sandler’s long-last father, with Lovitz as an industrialist and Cummings his wife. Chris Parnell will be a bank manager while Forte and Danny Trejo have been hired as leaders of two local rival gangs. Buscemi’s a jack-of-all-trades, with Shelton reportedly on as Wyatt Earp and Ice rumoured to be, of all people, Mark Twain. Subtlety will clearly not be the order of the day here.
The Ridiculous Six began life as a project for both Sony and Paramount but is now under Netflix’s welcoming banner. The company will no doubt be hoping this ends up as more successful than Seth MacFarlane’s flop-tastic A Million Ways To Die In The West.