With Eddie Murphy already attached, it looked like sci-fi comedy Starship Dave was all ready for blast off.
Well, it was until scheduled director Pete Segal double-checked his diary and discovered that he was already booked to star working on the movie version of classic TV spy spoof Get Smart.
Thankfully, Murphy chucked the script to director Brian Robbins, who’d just worked with him on Norbit, which finds Murphy doing a Nutty Professor and adopting multiple roles for the tale of a man engaged to a beast of a woman.
"Norbit is more a fairy tale - it has its own little world that we created," Robbins told Variety. "Starship Dave is more of a fish-out-of-water movie." The plot of Dave finds a crew of miniature humanoid aliens trying to find a way to save their doomed planet. Their ship is also in the form of a man – Eddie Murphy. And he’ll be doubling up on the performances again to play the ship’s captain.