Will Smith and his kid Jaden have a guaranteed formula for taking over the world. First, star in the heartwarming The Pursuit of Happyness, and get the entire world to love you. Then take on something as ballsy as a remake of The Karate Kid set in China, and impress everyone with your moxie. Then you hire the screenwriter from Pursuit of Happyness, Steven Conrad, ensuring that you'll warm everyone's heart again and escape the whole mess unscathed.
THR's Risky Biz Blog is reporting that Conrad has signed on to write the script, despite the fact that production starts next month. Either that means they'll be lifting whole scenes from the original movie, and therefore don't have that much writing to do, or this whole scriptwriting process moves a lot faster than I'd thought.
Columbia Pictures has also confirmed that Taraji P. Henson will play the mother of Jaden Smith's character, who is mentored by a kung fu master (Jackie Chan) when he and his mom move to China. The Risky Biz article makes no mention of the movie's supposed title, The Kung Fu Kid, but I'm really, really hoping that doesn't mean they've decided to just call it Karate Kid after all. It's one thing to remake the movie and set it in China and all that, but another entirely to just pretend that karate is a Chinese thing and leave it at that. I know Smith and company are shrewdly assuming that we'll go along with whatever they offer us, but that really might be one step too far.
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Will Smith and his kid Jaden have a guaranteed formula for taking over the world. First, star in the heartwarming The Pursuit of Happyness, and get the entire world to love you. Then take on something as ballsy as a remake of The Karate Kid set in China, and impress everyone with your moxie. Then you hire the screenwriter from Pursuit of Happyness, Steven Conrad, ensuring that you'll warm everyone's heart again and escape the whole mess unscathed.
