Will Smith and his Overbook Entertainment team are refusing to give up on the remake of 1974 buddy comedy Uptown Saturday Night, and now they – along with Warner Bros. – have hired comedy writer Tim Dowling to craft another new draft of the script.
You may recall that in January last year, Pajiba’s Hollywood Cog dug up rumours that Denzel Washington was considering jumping aboard the film. The latest update doesn’t mention whether Washington has left the rumour zone and is actually interested, but that might depend on the script that Dowling writes under the supervision of director David Dobkin.
The original Uptown starred Bill Cosby and Sidney Poitier and saw two estranged friends crossing paths at a nightclub and getting their wallets pinched. When they discover the next morning that one of the wallets contained a winning lottery ticket, they set out together to find it.
Dowling has been involved with the scripts for Role Models and Adam Sandler’s recent laugh-grabber Just Go With It, and also wrote on McG’s action-comedy This Means War. It’s likely he’ll make some story changes for the new version of Uptown, but we’ll have to wait and see whether it manages to crawl out of the development pile, which is where it’s largely sat since Smith and co bought the rights back in 2002.