For a brief moment, Ben Stiller and Tom Cruise were rumored to be circling “The Hardy Men,” a comedic take on the classic detective series for boys. At the time Tom Cruise was still reeling from a double whammy of dissing Brooke Shields and embarrassing himself on “Oprah”.
He’s since redeemed himself in the public eye with his turn in “Tropic Thunder” (which we really didn’t find all that funny) and returned to doing boring, safe, big-budget franchise stuff (ie. next summer’s “Knight & Day”). Shawn Levy, who has built a career out of directing terrible comedies that make piles of money, recently told Starpulse, that the film is still in development but that “developing a movie for two [big] movie stars is a very, very challenging enterprise.”
We kind of hope it doesn’t happen. We prefer Stiller when his schtick is dialed down and blended with drama (“The Royal Tenenbaums” and the forthcoming “Greenberg”) and as for Tom Cruise, while he continues to circle interesting projects (most recently David Cronenberg’s “The Matarese Circle,” though he did seem to eventually bail on it too) he seems to sign on with work that is populist, familiar or transparently Oscar baiting. We don’t see him doing this unless he embarrasses himself again or the script actually manages not to be horrible.