After spending the last few years making terrible comedies like Grown Ups, That's My Boy and Jack & Jill, Adam Sandler is looking to once again try and get back into drama. According to The Wrap, the star is now in negotiations to star in The Cobbler, the new film that is set to be Win Win director Tom McCarthy's next film.
White the source doesn't say if McCarthy wrote the script for the film himself - as he has with all three of his previous directorial efforts - it's noted that the story centers on a shoe repair man (played by Sandler) who somehow has the metaphysical ability to experience lives through other people's eyes "for a certain period of time." Presumably this means that the movie will have some sort of science-fiction/fantasy/magical realism element, but it's not confirmed in the report.
While The Cobbler sounds like it could definitely be an interesting project, it wasn't what McCarthy originally had planned as his next feature. In late 2012 it was reported that the writer/director was developing a new film called Spotlight that would be set in Boston and center around the Catholic Church abuse scandal. Earlier this year Dreamworks and Participant Media picked up to the movie, but that no longer seems to be the case as The Wrap notes that "DreamWorks forced producers to find a new home for the project." McCarthy will move forward with The Cobbler but has plans to return to Spotlight next year.
As for Sandler, while his early movies like Happy Gilmore and Billy Madison remain fun guilty pleasures, the quality of his comedic work in the last decade has taken a serious nosedive. The laziness of the movies that he's been putting out have suggested that the former SNL star has just given up on trying, so it's really great to see him team up with someone like Tom McCarthy on a project. Sandler has proven that he can do great things when paired with the right filmmaker and working with the right material, and you don't have to look further than Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch Drunk Love to find evidence of that:
Sander will start filming The Cobbler soon, but next up will be seen reteaming with his Wedding Singer and 50 First Dates co-star Drew Barrymore in the upcoming Frank Coraci romanic comedy The Familymoon. He is also attached to star in Jason Reitman's Men, Women & Children, which he will start filmming once he's completed work on McCarthy's film.
