Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum in talks for “24 Jump Street” after years of development woes

Key points

• Jonah Hill, Channing Tatum, and Ice Cube are all in talks to reprise their 21 Jump Street roles in 24 Jump Street.

• Rodney Rothman (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse) is directing and co-writing the film.

• A third installment in the series has been in the early stages of development for more than a decade.

The Jump Street bros are jumping back into action.

Jonah Hill, Channing Tatum, and Ice Cube are all in talks to return to the action-comedy franchise with 24 Jump Street, Entertainment Weekly has learned. The three actors previously starred in 2012’s 21 Jump Street and 2014’s 22 Jump Street.

Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the powerhouse filmmaking duo who directed the first two installments and recently had massive success with Project Hail Mary, are not returning to direct. However, the pair will remain on board as producers alongside Neal H. Moritz, who also produced the first two movies.

Rodney Rothman, who co-wrote 22 Jump Street, will direct the threequel. Rothman was one of three credited directors of 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which he also wrote alongside Lord.

Rothman penned the current script for 24 Jump Street with Hill, who also wrote the previous two movies, and Meghan Malloy, who worked as a production consultant on Into the Spider-Verse and previously collaborated with Rothman on the yet-unrealized live-action series based on the anime The Promised Neverland.

There’s no immediate explanation for why the third film in the franchise is titled 24 Jump Street instead of 23 Jump Street. However, the movie iteration of the franchise, which is based on the Fox police procedural TV show 21 Jump Street, has always had a self-aware, meta-comedic edge that pokes fun at action movie conventions and Hollywood franchising, so it’s entirely possible that the movie would pretend that it’s a sequel to a 23 Jump Street that we never actually saw.

It’s been a long road to Sony developing a third film in the franchise. Variety first reported that Rothman would write the screenplay in 2013, just a few months after 22 Jump Street hit theaters. In 2015, Miller said that “a really good first draft” of the screenplay was completed as he announced that he and Lord probably wouldn’t direct the film.

Leaked emails from the 2014 Sony hack revealed that that studio also attempted to develop a crossover between Jump Street and Men in Black: “jump street merging with mib i think that’s clean and rad and powerful,” Hill wrote in one of the emails, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Early reports suggested that the project, tentatively titled MiB 23, would have seen the Jump Street protagonists Morton Schmidt (Hill) and Greg Jenko (Tatum) take on a case involving aliens from the Men in Black series, and that the MiB agents portrayed by Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones would not have featured prominently in the story.

Sony officially announced MiB 23 at CinemaCon in 2016, with The Muppets director James Bobin entering talks to direct the project, but Hill cast doubt that the crossover film would ever materialize later that year.

“They’re trying to make all the deals, but it’s kind of impossible with all the Men in Black stuff,” he explained. “The Jump Street films were so fun to make, and the whole joke of them was they were making fun of remakes and sequels and reboots, and then now it’s become a giant sequel, reboot. It’s almost become what we were making fun of, and it’s hard to maintain that joke when it’s so high-stakes.”

Tatum said that he was still excited about a third, non-crossover Jump Street movie in 2024, but cautioned that there were logistical constraints that could make the production difficult.

“There is a project that was written and it’s still the best script that I’ve ever read for a third movie,” the actor star told ComicBook.com. “It’s just a lot of bureaucracy, kind of above-the-line stuff. It’s really hard to get it made, and we’ve been trying to get it done.”

He added, “I would love to do it with Jonah [Hill], and Jonah I know wants to do it. We would love to just get to go play again.”

Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with our EW Dispatch newsletter.

22 Jump Street ended with rapid-fire montage of goofy new missions for Schmidt and Jenko that were presented as low-effort sequel ideas, including 23 Jump Street: Medical School and 24 Jump Street: Foreign Exchange, the latter of which saw the two protagonists travel to Russia.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly