Can we all just agree that the funny boat has sailed on Adam Sandler? His last movie, Jack & Jill, cleaned up at the Razzies, justifiably so. It was especially painful to sit through as you had to watch the great Al Pacino also being dragged down and beaten over the head with the never-ending waves of stupid.
Now, according to Vulture, Sandler is in talks to replace Mark Wahlberg in Three Mississippi, a comedy I had really been looking forward to watching.
The film, which previously had the eye-wateringly bad title Turkey Bowl, would have seen Wahlberg star opposite Will Ferrell as the respective patriarchs of two rival families that face off against each other in an annual American football game every Thanksgiving, with Wahlberg’s family always coming off second best.
However, Wahlberg has had to pull out of the project due to some weird scheduling conflicts. With Battleship not exactly setting the box office alight, Universal have decided that they were no longer going to finance director Peter Berg’s next project, Lone Survivor. Berg manage to acquire alternate funding, but only on the promise of him successfully bagging a big name star to headline the Navy SEAL film. He did that by getting Wahlberg to sign on the dotted line and production will start on the project in the next few months.
However since his co-star Will Ferrell would be working on his own major film, Anchorman 2, at the start of 2013, it didn’t leave much room for Wahlberg to shoot Three Mississippi this year, and Ferrell wasn’t prepared to shelve the project until next year.
And with Warner Bros’ recent replacement of director Adam McKay with Sean Anders it opened the door for Sandler, who had just done That’s My Boy with him, to take Wahlberg’s place.
While I was seriously looking forward to the soft-spoken Wahlberg ‘s loser dad facing off against what will probably be an extremely snarky and overbearing Will Ferrell (which is when he is at his best), I can’t say I feel the same way about Sandler. His obnoxious man-child schtick is getting seriously old now, and just needs to be out to pasture.
Last Updated: June 1, 2012
