Paramount Pictures has appointed Iron Man 3 scribe Drew Pearce to pen the screenplay for The Wedding Sting, a fact-based cop comedy that involves undercover detectives and elaborately staged matrimonial ceremonies.
Deadline has the scoop, revealing that the studio’s pitch takes inspiration from an article in The Atlantic from earlier this year. Jeff Maysh’s piece recounts a 1990 wedding ceremony, one which seen a pair of rural Michigan cops posing as newlyweds in order to attract every drug dealer in town under the one roof. It was considered a clandestine and effective means of quelling the power of dealers in the area, as they peddled cocaine, marijuana, LSD, and prescription pills, and even inspired the police force to stage similar fake weddings in the years that followed.
Deemed to be one of the worst cities to live in America during the 1980s, Flint, Michigan was caught in the throes of a depression at the time, with many of its population either out of work or struggling to make ends meet. It’s for this reason that the so-called Wedding Sting was born out of necessity, as the town’s struggling police department cooked up an efficient plan that would allow them to arrest key members of the drug cartel in one fell swoop.
Now, Maysh’s report will underpin Paramount’s The Wedding Sting. Pitched as a comedy-drama, Drew Pearce joins the project off the back of his work on fellow Paramount feature Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, where he penned an early treatment for the actioner. Outside of that, the scribe is involved in Sony’s all-male Ghostbusters reboot, which is very much still alive and kicking last we heard.
