‘Disney’ and ‘Seth Rogen’ are three words you probably wouldn’t expect ever to hear in the same sentence, but the movie industry is full of surprises, and if Robert Rodriguez can include Spy Kids and Sin City in his credits, then there’s nothing to stop Seth Rogen from coming on board to produce a Disney film.
Variety are reporting that Rogen, fresh from his turn in the indie comedy 50/50, which has been doing brilliantly in the past few months, is now set to board Disney’s spy comedy The B Team as a producer, with an eye to star in it too.
The project focuses on,
“a top secret agent being kidnapped, leaving his tech support team and researchers to rescue him.”
Disney picked up the project back in 2008, buying a pitch from the writing team of Derek Guiley and David Schneiderman (Chasing Liberty), with Charles Segars set to produce and the writers’ manager, Ilan Breil, to executive produce.
I’m a huge fan of all of Rogen’s work, so any news about potential future roles for him is a win in my books. The thing I’m most interested to see about how this turns out is the audience it will be targeted at. Naturally, the majority of Disney’s films are mostly aimed at a younger audience, and a spy comedy could well go that way, as Rodriguez’s films have shown. But there are plenty of Disney films aimed at an older audience, so The B Team at least has potential/precedence to go down that path too.
The premise isn’t quite enough to go on for sure, but I’d guess that it’ll be aimed at a young adult audience, with the same Rogen that we all know and love – and if you don’t, then you really should – but without an F-bomb in sight. It is Disney, after all.
I’m really hoping that Rogen will star in the film, as well as produce it, because it’s always a welcome opportunity to see him on the big screen. If he does, keep your fingers crossed that he’ll take a hand at working on the script too to customise it to his own tastes, because as his writing credits on Superbad, Pineapple Express, and many more prove, the man is a bit of a comedy genius. More news as we get it.
