Ryan Reynolds always seems to have a dozen projects on his plate at any given time, and some of them tend to fall through the cracks and into the gaping chasm of development hell. One such project is Clue, a remake of the 1985 cult classic that would have re-teamed the Deadpool star with Jason Bateman for the first time since body swap comedy The Change-Up.
With Bateman initially in the director’s seat, things looked promising. Reynolds, also producing the film, then brought in his Deadpool and 6 Underground collaborators Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick to crack the script. Last year, Bateman dropped out of the director’s chair but remained on board to star, and The Muppets‘ James Bobin was hired to step behind the camera in February 2020. But since then, word on the project has gone silent.
During the press rounds for Free Guy, Reynolds was asked by Collider for a status update on Clue, and the prognosis isn’t great. The 44 year-old star admitted that the Disney/Fox merger may have hammered the final nail into Clue’s coffin.
“I don’t know if we’re ever going to end up ever getting that made. It’s one of those things that in the shuffle of Disney acquiring Fox, I’m not sure we’ll ever get to, but we’ll see hopefully down the road. I love Jason Bateman, I couldn’t be a bigger Jason Bateman fan, so if it’s not this, it’ll be something else that we hopefully get to work on down the road.”
The original feature film version was notable for being shipped to theaters with three different endings, with no rhyme or reason as to which finale ended up where, creating a unique sense of unpredictability. It may have bombed at the box office after failing to recoup the $15 million budget, but it’s long since gained a life as a perennially overlooked favorite.
Reynolds and Bateman are both top comic talents, and it would have been great to see them reunite on such a broad comic outing like Clue. But unless something drastic changes, it doesn’t look likely to be happening.