Across Community and Married along with their award-winning work on The Descendants, Jim Rash and Nat Faxon have built up quite the catalog of projects over the past two-to-three years. It’s a streak that hasn’t gone without recognition either, with Deadline reporting that the creative duo are now poised to take point for Fox’s all-new slasher movie, Dead Mall.
Billed as an atypical coming-of-age story, Rash and Faxon’s pitch revolves around the titular, abandoned mall that’s fallen into disrepair following a steep drop-off in the number shoppers venturing into its cavernous halls. Now teetering on the edge of ruin, a group of bumbling 40-somethings decide to throw caution and common sense to the wind and explore its dark and uninviting corridors.
Indeed, the core concept balancing the comedy with the horror in Dead Mall is that this group, sleepwalking through life in something of a collective mid-life crisis, ought to have the wherewithal to avoid the gruesome and over-the-top deaths that befall their teenage counterparts. It’s unclear as of yet just how meta and self-referential Rash and Faxon’s pitch will turn out to be, but there’s plenty of potential to exploit a genre and poke fun at recurring themes in the vein of, say, Cabin in the Woods.
Neither Deadline nor Fox disclosed an official release date for Dead Mall, and it’s understood to be incubating in the early stages of pre-production. For now, we know that Kevin Walsh is producing through B Story production company, while Nat Faxon and Jim Rash will executive produce.
