He was one of the writers on Iron Man 3, wrote/directed One-Shot spin-off All Hail The King (the picture above sees him with a plucky young newcomer of an actor who could make it in the film world) and helped Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation get off the ground with an early script draft. Now Drew Pearce’s mind is turning to matters matrimonial, albeit with a criminal twist as he’s writing The Wedding Sting for Paramount.
The story is based on a real-life undercover sting that went down in rural Michigan in 1990, and was chronicled in an Atlantic article by Jeff Maysh this past May, which you can read here. Detectives in a small town, disgusted by the thriving local drug trade, recruited two plain clothes officers to throw a lavish fake wedding and pose as newlyweds, with the gullible local drug dealers invited. One the criminals arrived, they discovered that it was an elaborate set-up and they were promptly all arrested.
It’s not the first time someone has thought to turn an idea like this into a film – back in 2006, Warner Bros. had a script pitch called Committed For Life by Shane Morris that chronicled an FBI sting operation with another fake wedding that corralled mobsters. That one saw the main agents involved fall in love for real, but appears to have gotten lost in movie limbo. With Pearce’s name attached, the Paramount version has a better chance of success, but it’s still early days.
And this is just one of the projects the prolific Pearce is working on: he’s also scripting crime film The Long Run for Fox, is collaborating with Jason Segel on Lego Movie spin-off The Billion Brick Race and has been involved with fellow Marvel types Joe and Anthony Russo on another Ghostbusters film for Sony.