While it feels like it took forever to get going, Jay and Seth vs. The Apocalypse is finally becoming a real movie. Now titled simply The Apocalypse, the project got a big boost late last year when Seth Rogen said that the movie would be going into production in 2012 and that Jonah Hill, Danny McBride, James Franco and Craig Robinson had joined the cast and will be playing themselves. Now, however, the most important part of filmmaking may be coming together: money.
THR has learned that Sony is now in talks to both finance and distribute The Apocalypse. The film will mark the directorial debut of both Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, who are best known as writing partners who produced scripts for Superbad, Pineapple Express, Green Hornet and the upcoming Neighborhood Watch (they also wrote the script for The Apocalypse). The story will follow Rogen, Hill, McBride, Franco, Robinson and Jay Baruchel as they are holed up in Franco's Los Angeles apartment. A source close to the trade said that the film's budget will be somewhere in the $30 to $40 million range. There have actually been multiple suitors for the project, but Sony is the leader. The film is based on a short that Rogen and Baruchel did which you can see below:
I'm so happy that this film is moving forward. As I expressed multiple times while covering Roman Polanski's Carnage, I'm a huge fan of sticking a bunch of people in a room and having them scream at each other for 90 minutes. I have total faith in this group of comedians and I sincerely hope they don't let us down.
