Queen Latifah landed a best supporting actress nod for her role as the prison mother-hen in Chicago. Since then she has starred in Taxi, The Cookout and Last Holiday. She has real potential to shine in good movies, but she doesn’t seem to be looking too aggressively for them.
Variety reports that she will star in Welfare Queen, a fact-based story of a woman, Dorothy Woods, who scammed the welfare system out of a fortune. Just what we need, another example of people claiming that welfare shouldn’t exist because it is exploited. Never mind that millions of people in need benefit from it; let’s make a film about one of the bad scapegoat ones.
Welfare Queen is a part of a first-look deal between Latifah’s production company, Focus Features, and Rogue Pictures. Abdul Williams is currently writing the screenplay. ”This is the first major deal we've signed with a studio, and we did it because we felt confident we could go from Welfare Queen to Horror in the Hamptons, which is a script by Alex Mirkin about a bunch of 16-year-olds chopping each other up" Latifah said. Sounds about as promising as this one.
