Walt Becker, director of Wild Hogs, is gearing up to strike again – sorry, make another movie.
Disney has picked up the rights to fish-out-of-water comedy, Family Dude, for Becker to produce.
The comedy revolves around the notion that a successful but uptight finance exec would somehow persuade his next-door neighbour, a single mother of three, to join him on a dude ranch in Montana and pretend to be his wife (and the kids his family) so he can close a big business deal.
You can guess the rest, right? She slowly melts his uptight heart. He faffs around for a bit on the dude ranch, completely out of his depth, then magically steps up to the plate and shows his fellow dude ranchers that he’s a man, goddammit! Then she’ll see something in him that will make her fall for him. But – uh-oh! – his bosses find out about the subterfuge! Then she gets pissed off about something incredibly trivial! Can he win back his job with the big pitch, and win the heart of his beloved, before telling his bosses where they can stick their job because he realises that – hey! - true happiness doesn’t come from sitting behind a desk and pushing pencils and getting up at 7am to write news stories for a film website, but instead from being a man, and grappling with manly things in a manly way.
That, of course, is all just a big guess, but we’d be amazed if we weren’t 90% bang on. After all, with a premise like this, you’d assume that the script pretty much writes itself. Except, in this case, it was actually written by Steven Gary Banks and Claudia Graziosi, who are best-known, of course, for writing Are We There Yet? So, when we say that we’re not expecting great things, you know that we mean it.
Becker is currently in post on Old Dogs, a comedy that, like Wild Hogs, boasts a cracking cast (Robin Williams, John Travolta, Seth Green, Matt Dillon, Bernie Mac). He’s also got several other projects in active development, so he might not sign on to direct Family Dude. But we’ll keep you informed of developments – we know you’d kick yourselves if you missed out on some Family Dude production news.