Here's a remake project most either forgot about or thought was long dead. About six or seven years ago Warner Bros. set out on a remake of Brewster's Millions, the 1985 comedy starring Richard Pryor and John Candy. Absolutely nothing has been heard about it since, but now it's being revived with Robert Townsend directing.
Brewster's Millions is actually based on a 1902 novel by George McCutcheon, and centers on a playboy who stands to inherit a large sum of money from a wealthy uncle. Or he can inherit more if he spends the original sum in certain ways in a specific time frame, and he has to keep it all secret from friends and family.The film has been adapted for the screen multiple times, with the Pryor version the most well-known and probably the one that deviated furthest from the book.
Townsend was once a fixture on the African-American comedy scene, directing the brilliant satire Hollywood Shuffle (a must see), the R&B music drama The Five Heartbeats (also great), and superhero comedy The Meteor Man (meh). That he's being entrusted with a film like this means he could be on the verge of a comeback. I was a big fan of Brewster's Millions, of course I was 8 years old at the time, and consider Hollywood Shuffle a classic. So I'm really looking forward to seeing how this develops.
