Presumably after taking a couple dozen showers to wash off the stench of his atrocious Annie remake, Will Gluck is teaming with Walt Disney Studios to direct an untitled lottery project.
The pic, which was originally written for a male lead and titled Lucky Guy but is being retooled to feature a female protagonist, centers on a perpetually unlucky young woman who is flabbergasted when everyone in her small town wins a lottery apart from her. However, this apparent misfortune turns out to leave her as the only person standing between her town and total disaster.
Gluck is helping scribe Martin Hynes to rewrite the pic for a female lead. He’s uniquely qualified for the gig, given his killer breakthrough Easy A, which proved a star-making vehicle for Emma Stone, and crowd-pleasing comedy Friends with Benefits, which featured Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake.
Annie was an absolute train-wreck and one of the worst films to come out last year (I ranked it just behind Jason Reitman’s cringeworthy Men, Women & Children and the crushingly terrible Godzilla remake), so Gluck is hardly in my good graces right now, but there’s no denying that the helmer has made some strong comedies in the past. Easy A was a breath of fresh air in how it riffed on teen sex comedies and Hollywood’s perception of high school life, and if Gluck can infuse this lottery pic with similar wit and wisdom, it will be worth a watch. Or at the very least, it will have to be better than Annie (I pray).
