Will Smith is building himself up quite a little side-career in producing movies. The star already has some seven movies on his production slate for the future, including Hancock and Neil LaBute's next, and now he's planning to work on a remake of French box-office hit Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis, which broke records when it was released in its home country.
The remake, which will go by the name of Welcome To The Sticks (which, if our low-grade pidgen French is correct, is almost a direct translation – although Ch'tis doesn't mean sticks, we don't think, and refers to the dialect of the town in the film), will be developed at Warner Bros and be co-produced by James Lassiter and Ken Stovitz.
The story of the original was about a post office manager from a pleasant town in the South of France who is sent to a rainy backwater town in the north of the country, where he finds the local language and behaviour to be unintelligible. Stovitz says that the Americanised version will most likely have the lead character working for a global corporation before the downshift.