As Mr. Spock once put it, only Nixon could go to China. But it took erstwhile basketball stalwart and one-time wannabe movie star Dennis Rodman to go to North Korea, and his weird overtures to despot Kim Jong-un are now the subject of a planned comedy at Fox called Diplomats. And Ride Along director Tim Story is the man the studio wants to make it happen{
Story, of course, is riding high at the moment thanks to the smash success of the Ice Cube/Kevin Hart mismatched buddy cop comedy. He’s in the middle of juggling the final work on Think Like A Man Too before he segues into the planned** Ride Along **sequel.
Fox has Jonathan Abrams writing Diplomats as a two-hander comedy based on Rodman’s visits to North Korea last year and this past January, where he organized a basketball game, schmoozed with the leader and even sang happy birthday to the man generally believed to be an unstable dictator, all in the hopes of forging ties between the US and the country once described as part of an "axis of evil". His reception has not been as warm as he’d hoped, except possibly by Kim.
Story may end up making the new film after he finishes** Ride Along ****2: Ride Harder **(or whatever it ends up being called), but he’s in demand, so Diplomats might have to wait or find someone else. Think Like A Man Too will be out here on September 19.