Did Lionsgate learn nothing from its Nicolas Cage movie?
The studio is setting Jonathan Majors to play Dennis Rodman in the raucous comedy 48 Hours in Vegas, which will chronicle Rodman’s trek to Sin City in the middle of the 1998 NBA Finals.
There’s no director yet, but the script hails from Jordan VanDina (The Binge), and Phil Lord and Chris Miller are producing with Aditya Sood, while Rodman is executive producing alongside Ari Lubet and Will Allegra.
VanDina wrote the script during the pandemic and Lionsgate landed the hot spec in a competitive auction last summer. VanDina was inspired to delve into the story in the wake of ESPN’s Chicago Bulls documentary The Last Dance, which explored the incident in greater detail than ever before, but still didn’t get into the debaucherous specifics of Rodman’s trip. VanDina’s script pairs Rodman with a skittish assistant GM and follows their budding friendship over the course of a madcap adventure.
While this project sounds like a lot of fun to me, an NBA fan and someone who followed Rodman’s evolution into a one-man circus, I’m not sure if there will be a huge audience for this film, especially seeing as how The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent grossed only $29 million worldwide.
Yes, I’ve heard very good things about Majors’ villainous turn in Creed III, which is due out next March, and he’s about to be a major villain in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as he’ll reprise his Loki role as Kang The Conqueror in Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania. That superhero sequel hits theaters in February, which may have had something to do with the delay of Creed III, since audiences will be far more familiar with Majors after the third Ant-Man film.
Those are two big movies, to be sure, but can Majors open a film on his own? We’ll find out this Thanksgiving when he plays a famed Navy fighter pilot in Sony’s war movie Devotion, which drew mixed reviews out of Toronto. Majors has also wrapped the indie Magazine Dreams, which finds him playing an amateur bodybuilder who struggles to find human connection.
Majors is represented by WME and Entertainment 360. Deadline broke the news of his casting.
