It’s about to be another “One of Them Days,” as a sequel to the hit comedy starring Keke Palmer and SZA and produced by Issa Rae is in early development at TriStar Pictures.
Palmer and SZA are expected to return for the new movie, along with the film’s original creative team, but plot details are still being kept under wraps.
Directed by Lawrence Lamont in his feature debut and from a script written by Syreeta Singleton, “One of Them Days” was a breakout hit at the box office, grossing over $50 million worldwide after its January release — a particularly strong number for an R-rated mid-budget comedy. The critically acclaimed movie (with a stellar 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes) was also a standout on Netflix, where it spent three weeks on the streamer’s top 10 list.
The film follows best friends and roommates Dreux (Palmer) and Alyssa (SZA) as they race against the clock to avoid eviction when they discover Alyssa’s boyfriend has blown their rent money on the same day Dreux has an important interview for her dream gig. The South Los Angeles-set movie, which drew comparisons to classic comedies like “Friday,” also stars Lil Rel Howery, Janelle James, Keyla Monterroso Mejia, Maude Apatow, Katt Williams, Joshua Neal, Aziza Scott, Patrick Cage, Dewayne Perkins, Amin Joseph, Gabrielle Dennis and DomiNque Perry.
“One of Them Days” was produced by Rae’s Hoorae Media with Macro Film Studios co-financing. Producers also included ColorCreative co-founder Deniese Davis, Hoorae’s Sara Rastogi and Macro’s James Lopez and Poppy Hanks. Executive producers were Palmer, Sharon Palmer, Charles D. King and Jeff Valeri.
The project was born from the CoCre lab at Sony Pictures, where Singleton’s script (originally titled “The Jungles” after the South L.A. neighborhood where it’s set) spent nearly seven years in development before launching in theaters. The lab was a pact between ColorCreative and Sony Pictures, announced in 2018, to source and incubate emerging, diverse screenwriters to develop and write their first studio feature based on original ideas.
“It’s something to be really proud of. A lot of studios want to create programs to find new writers and champion new voices, and a lot of those initiatives fizzled out,” TriStar Pictures president Nicole Brown told Variety in an interview conducted earlier this year about the CoCre lab.
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“This program is, while modern, in terms of championing diverse voices, it’s old-fashioned in the way of believing in writers, believing in talent, investing in talented people, and saying, ‘Let’s keep building this relationship,’” Brown said. “When we’re patient and invest in talent, then great work can come. But we have to give them the time to build, and we’ve got to give them the support. I hope it will inspire more studios to invest in great voices and give them the time to build great things.”
Rastogi conceived the program with her then-colleague Bryan Smiley while they worked at Sony’s Columbia Pictures. “It’s been a long journey and process, and an atypical one as well,” Rastogi said. “Getting paid is one of the biggest barriers to entry, and as we talked about it, it became apparent that there’s a big difference between the person who gets to sit at the coffee shop and write and the person who has to work at the coffee shop.”
With that in mind, a key element of the program was that the selected writers would get paid during the process. The idea, Rastogi explained, was, “Let’s build something that allows them to walk away with eligibility for the WGA, a studio-developed project and hopefully that project can turn into a full-fledged feature film and go through the studio pipeline. This program was meant to be the cheat code.”
The Sony team then turned to Rae and Davis at ColorCreative, who founded their company on the tenet of supporting diverse voices. In 2014, Rae and Davis launched an initiative to give three underserved writers a chance to produce their pilot and gain experience as showrunners. (Singleton was one of those three pilot writers, which led to her being staffed on Rae’s hit HBO show “Insecure” before serving as showrunner on “Rap Sh!t” for Max.) By the time Sony came knocking, ColorCreative had already worked with companies like Project Greenlight and BET to develop pipeline partnerships, so they’d learned how to build something that could make a real impact.
“When you look at lab programs or other pipeline programs, they normally exist just for development. Which is a huge win, but it’s very rare that it results in a job or a produced piece of work,” Davis explained. “We always felt like that’s the ultimate moment of success in terms of someone’s career: You can tell someone you’ve had something developed, and no one knows about it, but when it’s produced, then you have better legs to stand on.”
Singleton’s script was one of four projects selected, and the creative team worked for years to develop it into the right package. “Prior to that, I had just been writing spec scripts, so I didn’t have any expectations,” Singleton recalled. “I felt very seen, understood, comfortable and excited. Like my stories were in good hands with people who genuinely cared about what it was I was trying to do.”
A couple of years and a couple drafts of the script later, Palmer signed on to the project, with her star power legitimizing it as a potential theatrical play. Then Lamont, who’d worked with the team on HBO’s “Rap Sh!t,” was tapped to direct. But when SZA got on board and the project moved to TriStar Pictures, things kicked into high gear.
“I adore fresh perspectives and bold voices, and when this script rose to the top and felt ready to get into a serious production conversation, I immediately said, ‘I love these characters.’ I saw the chemistry. I saw the sparkle, the fairy dust, and that’s a reason in and of itself to make a movie,’” Brown said of giving the green light. “I knew there was magic there, and I was honored to get to work on something that I could understand so well, personally, but also knew how to support in the studio system.”
And because Palmer and SZA had a short window of availability, pre-production got underway in April 2024, so that cameras could begin rolling in July. The studio set the project for an early 2025 release date, meaning that they’d need to get the movie out in under a year.
“We were shooting an original comedy developed at a studio by a first-time writer, a first-time filmmaker and SZA’s first film. We were just like, ‘Guys, we better just put our heads down and get this going before someone adds up all the firsts,’” said Talitha Watkins, president of ColorCreative, which represents Lamont and Singleton. “I say this all the time, ‘You’ve got to be a thug to get a movie made in Hollywood. And we thugged this one out.”
Added Davis: “This is a miracle. But along the way, there was active growth and pieces were being placed to really give this an opportunity, to make this a different trajectory than what happens to projects in other labs. It takes belief. They say, ‘The biggest risk in Hollywood usually comes out to the best successes.’ I’m often surprised how often people don’t want to take risk in this town. Everyone who was a part of this project was willing to take that risk.”
For Singleton, who paid tribute to her South L.A. community with the buddy comedy, stepping onto set the first day was a dream come true.
“It was just like, so surreal,” she recalled. “It was just like, ‘Wow, they really let us shoot a movie in the Jungles. That’s crazy.’ I never take it for granted when something that I’ve written becomes [a real project].”
Singleton continued: “My hope and prayer is, with a story like this and with the excitement around it, that it gets more studios excited to invest in these kinds of stories again. I do have more stories to tell, and I hope that it gets a little easier every time — in terms of the amount of time that it takes. I hope that we all begin to see the value and demand.”
Evidently, TriStar saw was paying attention — and now they’re running it back for a sequel.
From Variety US