Frequent collaborators James Franco (Yosemite) and Seth Rogen (The Night Before), who have worked together on several projects including TV’s Freaks and Geeks, Pineapple Express, This is the End, The Interview, The Sound and The Fury, and the upcoming Zeroville, are re-teaming for The Disaster Artist and will now be joined by Josh Hutcherson (The Hunger Games franchise), according to The Hollywood Reporter. Dave Franco (Neighbors) rounds out the cast.
Besides starring in the film, Franco and Rogen will co-produce, along with Evan Goldberg, Vince Jolivette, and Good Universe. Franco is set to direct from a screenplay by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber (The Spectacular Now, The Fault in Our Stars).
Based on the nonfictional book by Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell, the story captures the resulting cinematic comedy of errors when Tommy Wiseau (to be played by Franco), an eccentric man with no filmmaking experience, grandiosely decides to write, direct, produce, and star in a movie. Indeed Wiseau went on to write, direct, produce, and star in a 2003 drama entitled The Room about a successful banker in San Francisco whose fiancée has an affair with his best friend. The low budget film co-starred Sestero (to be played by Dave Franco), and Philip Haldiman (to be played by Hutcherson). The Room opened to terrible reviews, with one critic describing the film as “like getting stabbed in the head.” It grossed a measley ≈$7,500 on its opening weekend and stopped being screened shortly thereafter, but a decade later began developing a cult following, largely for being such a bad movie. The subtitle of Sestero and Bissell’s book includes the tagline “The Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made.”
Hutcherson can be seen in theaters currently in the mega-hit The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2, the fourth film of the franchise in which he plays Peeta opposite Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss. Mockingjay 2 is doing brisk business, and so far has pulled in over $200 million domestically and over $450 million at the global box office. Upcoming, Hutcherson co-stars with director Franco in the John Steinbeck adaptation In Dubious Battle, scheduled for release next year, as well as The Long Home, scheduled for release in 2017. Hutcherson will reprise his role as Sean in Brad Petyon’s Journey 3: From the Earth to the Moon, which co-stars Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson (Furious 7), second sequel to 2008’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. He will also be seen next year in Backstabbing for Beginners opposite Academy award winner Ben Kingsley (Self/less), a thriller about a United Nations employee who stumbles upon an international conspiracy plot about oil reserves.
The Disaster Artist comes from New Line Cinema and will begin filming this upcoming week in Los Angeles.
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