There’s a basic appeal to the idea of the team-up movie. Since the dawn of fan fiction, people have dreamed of combining their favorite heroes, and it’s proved to be lucrative big-screen niche, from “Godzilla vs.King Kong” and “Alien vs. Predator” to next summer’s “The Avengers.” So it only makes sense that we’d eventually get a female-driven version of the genre, and by combining a trio of the biggest stars in the rom-com world, along with an acting legend, that seems to be what the producers of “Gently Down the Stream” are doing: it’s like “The Avengers,” but with stars of terrible romantic comedies.
Variety report that Robert De Niro, Katherine Heigl, Amanda Seyfried and Diane Keaton are all attached to star in the project, which will be written and directed by Justin Zackham, who was behind the script for “The Bucket List” and the recently cancelled FX series “Lights Out.” The plot revolves around a dysfunctional divorced couple who pretend to still be together during their adopted son’s wedding for the sake of his birth mother. So, a sort of heterosexual take on “La Cage Aux Folles,” then?
It’s certainly a high-calibre cast for this sort of thing, even if we wouldn’t count ourselves fans of most of the recent work of the four stars. De Niro and Keaton will be playing the central couple, with presumably either Heigl or Seyfried playing the bride-to-be. Millennium Films are co-producing with Zackham’s company, Two Ton Films, and the film will be retitled “The Big Wedding” internationally, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. We managed to dig up an international poster for the film thanks to a kindly reader, which you can see below.
While we pretty much loathed “The Bucket List,” we’ve heard good things about “Lights Out,” and Zackham’s saying all the right things so far, telling Variety “I’m excited to be able to continue what we started with on “The Bucket List”: iconic actors in a funny, adult, character-driven story ,albeit with a little more sex and bad behavior on everyone’s part.” We’ll see. Filming gets underway in Connecticut in July.
