Having had a quiet few years since the fiscally successful and generally appalling What Happens in Vegas,
Ashton Kutcher has developed a calculated three pronged attack on popular consciousness to propel him to the peaks that he has, in the past, only threatened to reach. Firstly, Kutcher embraced the social network of the moment, Twitter, being the first person to
attain a million followers and still remains the sixth most popular person on the network with over six million followers. Kutcher then followed up this new wave of popularity by starring alongside the now Oscar winner Natalie Portman in No Strings Attached, an insipid sex comedy that- for all to obvious reasons- made a spectacular amount of money ($134 million worldwide on $25 million budget). The final part of his fiendish comeback plan is to team up on screen with the most famous asexual adolescent on the planet,
Justin Bieber, the 2nd most popular twitterer on the planet for the movie
What Would Kenny Do, according to
The L.A. Times. Oh how the tweets have flown today. Justin Bieber has been happily reaping extortionate sums from hormonally unbalanced teenage girls (and those older women who should know better) with his Riefenstahlian, world-wide blockbuster tour documentary, Justin Bieber: Never Say Never. A film that, so they say, demonstrated the possibilities of 3D, i.e. makes one feel able to reach out and physically throttle those on screen, and which spread around the globe faster than swine flu conjuring up, not deaths, so much as cross-cultural desire for a swift end. Of course, thus far, it appears Kutcher is no especially concerned at how he raises his profile, merely that he does so, and the following description of the twos proposed collaboration shows that no depth of vacuity will be left unplumbed:
a teenager who meets a hologram claiming to be the adult version of himself; the hologram then helps guide the teen through high school.
Freaky Friday meets Back to the Future? The movie was written by
Chris Baldi (Man on the Bottom) as an R-Rated blacklisted approved script (clearly that has now changed), then became subject to a rewrite by
Scott Neustadter and
Michael Weber (500 Days of Summer) to make it friendler, but further new writers are said to still be in the pipeline, probably to make it even Bieber friendler. Therefore this one is someway away from being a go project - they haven't even got a director yet. Sony will produce via Overbrook and Kutchers own Katalyst Entertainment.