Following the box office success of The Vow, New Line has hired the romance's savvy screenwriting team, Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein, to revamp their in-development comedy Mean Moms. As you may have guessed from the title, this feature is intended as a sort of sister-flick to the sharp and sassy Mean Girls, as both are based on the nonfiction work of Rosalind Wiseman. But while Tina Fey translated Wiseman's incisive non-fiction book on the behavior of teen girls, Queen Bees and Wannabes, into a high-school set satire, Variety reveals Kohn and Silverstein have been brought on board to adapt Wiseman's bestselling self-help book Queen Bee Moms & Kingpin Dads, which warns of the dangers of being overprotective or conversely too lax.
Like Mean Girls, this film will center on a family moving into a new town and struggling with the transition. However, rather than focusing on the trials of the teens, Mean Moms will follow the matriarch of this clan. She'll be a wife and mother of two who must leave her small town niceties behind when confronted with the intense scrutiny and parental peer pressure she experiences in her new and swankier neighborhood.
Curiously, when they first set up this project in 2010, New Line had lined up Adam Shankman, Jennifer Gibgot and Jill Messick to produce the picture under Offspring's banner, and tapped the Pushing Daisies screenwriting team Dara and Chad Creasey to shape Wiseman's advice book into a sharp comedy. But it appears Creaseys' take was not to New Line's liking, and so Kohn and Silverstein will get their shot. This direction seems to mean New Line's looking to go mainstream, as this duo has collaborated on such audience-adored comedies as Never Been Kissed, Valentine's Day, and He's Just Not That Into You, which was notably based on an non-fiction book of romance advice. Undoubtedly they seem a solid team for scripting a box office winner, but I can't help but wonder what sort of offbeat whimsy the Creaseys would have brought to Mean Moms.
