Say goodbye to the days when Chevy Chase was the man bringing Gregory McDonald's infamous, wisecracking investigative reporter Irwin M. "Fletch" Fletcher to screens. Jon Hamm has the role now, and the first trailer for his take on the character, Confess Fletch, is online.
Superbad's Greg Mottola is the man updating and re-inventing the comedy classic character for the modern age, though he's still drawing from McDonald's books – Confess, Fletch, the second title in the series, was published in 1976.
The new movie, though, is set in the present day and finds Fletch trying to live a quiet life, but dragged back into investigations when pricey art is stolen from a count's villa in Rome.
"Fletch comes to Boston to track down a bunch of stolen paintings, and the first day he's there, he discovers a dead body in the Airbnb he's staying in," Mottola tells Entertainment Weekly. "The police think he's the murderer, so he has to simultaneously find the stolen art and clear his name."
The cast also includes Hamm's old Mad Men boss John Slattery, plus Roy Wood Jr, Marcia Gay Harden, Lorenza Izzo and Kyle MacLachlan. But don't expect to see Chase show up at any point…
"The reason we didn't ask Chevy Chase to be in it is not because we don't love the original movies, we do, but we thought this should be a new thing," Mottola explains. "There's a lot of things Chevy did that aren't in the Fletch books: his style of comedy, the slapstick, and all the different names and disguises. We thought it wouldn't be right to steal them. We reference the original, we pay homage to it, but we tried to really balance it halfway between a detective mystery and a comedy, possibly more than the original."
Confess, Fletch will be on limited theatrical release and on digital in the States from 16 September ahead of arriving on cable network Showtime on 28 October. There's no word yet of a plan for the UK, but it could conceivably land in cinemas here or be shown on Paramount+.