Universal’s comedy Strays has found its barks.
Will Ferrell, Jamie Foxx and Will Forte will voice star in the movie, which is a live-action-CGI hybrid adult-skewing comedy being directed by Josh Greenbaum and is the filmmaker’s follow-up to his feature breakout, Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar.
Dan Perrault (American Vandal) wrote the script, which follows an abandoned dog who teams up with other strays to get revenge on his former owner.
Ferrell is the abandoned dog while Foxx is one of the pooches who befriends him. Forte is the nasty human owner.
The movie shot in the fall and now heads into post-production. The canine characters are being created via visual effects.
The project has a kennel’s worth of producers. Erik Feig’s Picturestart initially developed it then approached Greenbaum and Louis Leterrier as well as Phil Lord and Chris Miller. All are now acting as producers as well as Lord Miller president of film, Aditya Sood.
Universal picked up Strays from Picturestart and Lord Miller in a preemptive situation earlier this year. The project falls under Lord Miller’s first-look with Universal.
Jessica Switch is executive producing and Julia Hammer is co-producing for Picturestart. Nikki Baida will executive produce for Lord Miller.
Senior vp of production development Jeyun Munford and director of development Tony Ducret will oversee for the studio.
Ferrell is now starring in The Shrink Next Door, an Apple TV mini-series that adapts the true-crime psychological drama podcast. The triple threat, who via his company Gloria Sanchez Productions produced Barb and Star, next star in Apple’s upcoming Christmas-themed musical film Spirited opposite Ryan Reynolds.
Foxx, who voiced the lead in Pixar’s Oscar-winning Soul, will next be seen in Spider-Man: No Way Home. He has two projects in the can: They Cloned Tyrone, with John Boyega, as well as Day Shift. opposite Dave Franco, both of which will hit Netflix next year. His memoir, Act Like You Got Some Sense, was released in October.
Forte was most recently seen in the streaming series Flipped, and was heard as the voice of characters in Scoob! and The Willoughbys. He lent his voice to Lord and Miller’s Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and The Lego Movie (the latter also featuring the voicework of Ferrell as well). He is developing MacGruber as a series, which would also reunite original castmates Kristin Wiig and Ryan Philippe, as a series for Peacock.
Ferrell is repped by UTA, Mosaic and Jackoway Austen. Foxx is repped by CAA, LBI Entertainment and Ziffren Brittenham. Forte is repped by UTA, Rise, Kovert Creative and Hansen, Jacobson.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
