Ben Stiller Replaces Russell Brand in RENTAGHOST
Hollywood star will play Fred Mumford, a recently deceased slacker who sees an opportunity to be more productive in death as a ghost than he ever was alive, so he sets up this temp agency for the dead.
Announced last December as a starring vehicle at Warner Bros for Russell Brand, Variety reports that instead it will be Ben Stiller and 20th Century Fox who revive the British childrens comedy T.V. show Rentaghost into a feature film. It's a new studio but they have the same idea to adapt the farcical and almost forgotten show into a Beetlejuice-style, afterlife comedy, just now with a bigger name and proven box office draw instead of the Brit comedian whose starring vehicle Arthur didn't do good business earlier this year and it's third place weekend opening (but more crucially that it didn't make money) forced WB to drop out the project. Fox saw the opportunity to attract a huge star to it and Brand is history. The original BBC show ran from 1976-1984 and followed a number of ghosts who worked for a firm called Rentaghost, who rented the spirits out to the public. Kind of the reverse of Ghostbusters. The WB film will follow Stiller's Fred Mumford, a recently deceased slacker who sees an opportunity to be more productive in death as a ghost than he ever was alive, so he sets up this temp agency for the dead. The job for Fox is now to make what was to be a comedy with some British sensibilities into one more suiting an American actor and to do this they have brought in Night at the Museum writers Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant to scribe. Expect it to be a broad blockbuster that will be aiming to attract as much of the $400 million audience who saw the Night at the Museum sequel. Rentaghost is likely to film next year.