You’ve Got Mail is getting new take decades after the prime of AOL. Warner Bros. is set to develop a new take on the romantic comedy with Jason Orley set to direct. So far, details are being kept under wraps as Orley (I Want You Back, Big Time Adolescence) is in progress of writing the first draft, based on screenplay by Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont (Can’t Hardly Wait, Josie and the Pussycats). Neal Moritz, who is coming off the 20th rom-com Beach Read, based on Emily Henry’s best seller, is producing the film alongside Tania Landau via Original Film.
The original film was directed by Nora Ephron and stars Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks as an independent children’s bookshop owner and the corporate bookselling magnate threatening her livelihood who become pen pals online and end up falling for each other without realizing their rival identities. The film is based on Miklos Laszlo’s play Parfumerie and its film adaptation The Shop Around the Corner, a rom-com that captured the emergence of email as a medium for intimacy, long before dating apps were around. It also spoke to the ’90s trend of big-box bookstores squeezing out independent shops. The original film was released back in December of 1998 via Warner Bros and grossed over $250M worldwide.
Orley is coming off of wrapping his third feature, which is an Amazon comedy titled Close Personal Friends which stars Brie Larson, Jack Quaid, Lilly Collins and Henry Golding and is produced by Maximum Effort as well as Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger which based on a story conceived by Orley and Aptaker. Orley had previously collaborated with Aptaker and Berger on the romantic comedy I Want You Back which was directed for Amazon. He also had a debut film which starred Pete Davidson comedy Big Time Adolescence which premiered in dramatic competition at the Sundance Film in 2019 and got acquired by Hulu. Screenwriter Kaplan and Elfont are not strangers to rom-rom as they are known for directing Can’t Hardly Wait and Josie and the Pussycats and also wrote Made of Honor and Leap Year. They have been creative partners since meeting at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and set up two films at Paramount last year which include, Guys with No Friends and The Romantic.
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