After the continued success of the 21 Jump Street franchise (the last film made $331 million (Dh1.9 billion) worldwide), Sony is planning to expand the universe with a female-centric spin.
According to TheWrap, the studio has hired writers Lucia Aniello and Paul W. Downs, best known for the acclaimed sitcom Broad City, to work on the script. Sony is hoping to broaden the franchise in a similar way to the upcoming set of Ghostbusters films.
Paul Feig’s all-women Ghostbusters, which will star Melissa McCarthy and Kristen Wiig, will come first with other related films to follow, including a male-fronted spin. Sony is also still working on a new Men in Black film which will crossover with 21 Jump Street and star Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill. It’s not been confirmed yet whether this will be the confirmed sequel 23 Jump Street or if it will exist separately.
Co-director Philip Lord was recently asked how they would cope with the fake sequels that were teased at the end of 22 Jump Street. “We’ve found a way that we love that makes those imagined sequels canonical and yet does something that we haven’t told you about yet,” he said at WonderCon earlier this month. In a separate interview with The New York Times he also went on to say: “Rodney Rothman is off writing a script. He had a really outrageous idea for what to do, and how we could take our scorched-earth sequel policy from the end of 22 Jump Street and do something that hadn’t been explored in those 22 sequels and simultaneously tell the next chapter in the story.”
