By Todd Northrop
Annie director Will Gluck is teaming with Walt Disney Studios to direct an untitled lottery movie based on the actual events of a Spanish lottery jackpot win.
The project, which was originally written for a male lead and titled Lucky Guy, is being retooled to feature a female protagonist and does not yet have a name.
The story centers on a perpetually unlucky young woman who is flabbergasted when everyone in her small town except her wins a lottery. However, this apparent misfortune turns out to leave her as the only person standing between her town and total disaster.
The project is based on similar incident in a tiny town in Spain named Sodeto in which every cititzen but one contributed to the national lottery and won a $950 million dollar jackpot.
(See Entire town, except one guy, wins $950M lottery, Lottery Post, Feb. 2, 2012.)
The Lego Movie's Dan Lin is producing. Lin Pictures' Mark Bauch is executive producing, and Tendo Nagenda is overseeing the project for the studio.
Gluck is helping writer Martin Hynes to rewrite the script for a female lead. He's uniquely qualified for the task, given his breakthrough movie Easy A, which proved a star-making vehicle for Emma Stone, and crowd-pleasing comedy Friends with Benefits, which featured Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake.
On the other hand, Annie was one of the worst-rated films to come out last year, but there's no denying that Gluck has made some strong comedies in the past. If Gluck can infuse this lottery movie with similar wit and wisdom to Easy A, it may be worth a viewing.
I would pay to view it.
The story centers on a perpetually unlucky young woman who is flabbergasted when everyone in her small town except her wins a lottery.
And how the young woman hired the best lawyers in the country and sued everyone in her small town claiming she had oral agreements with everyone to equally share their jackpot.
Gee whiz, Jennifer....you mean to tell us you can't make a buck dirty dancing?
You should listen to your brother Ferris and take a day off. (from spamming, anyway)
i don't see how this movie is going to attract an audience. there will be empty seats at all showings . the premise is just not that interesting. do you root for her because she failed to contribute or do you root against her because she didn't. maybe people can learn their lesson about not getting into lottery pools of any kind or number.
Here's my hope for this movie: I hope for once Hollywood makes a movie about lottery players in which the people playing the lottery are not portrayed as stupid people. Just about every lottery-related movie made so far suffers from the elitist Hollywood types looking down on people who play the lottery, so they write the characters as if they must be stupid if they are playing the lottery.
How about for once making the person who fails to buy a ticket the stupid one, and all the other folks are smart enough to play the tiny amount of money it costs to have a chance of winning. Because that's real life, and it goes against the high-minded "thinkers" in our society who are "so smart" that they believe every who plays the lottery must lack their superior intelligence.
That's why you don't see lottery-related movies or TV shows becoming popular. People are sick of being insulted by Hollywood. People might think the comedy is funny if they aren't being insulted by it.
I agree completely. These productions do typically come across as agenda driven and certainly proves a turn off rather than entertaining. It would be nice for them to highlight the hopes of the many players as well and what they would do should their numbers come in. Referencing the fact that they can now realise those dreams after the win in contrast to the one person who didn't bother to take a chance would be a powerful way to bring the movie to a climax.
how the lottery changed my life tv reality series on TLC was more interesting than a make believe movie would be. it appears this movie has no plot other than he or she didn't join in and everyone else won. lucky if the bijou theater in downtown detroit or cleveland picks this up, if it is even ever filmed which i doubt. coffee house film at best.
I think the only reason the media plays down lottery players as stupid is that playing the lottery is blatantly irrational. It would be interesting if a movie like this could also poke at the irrationalities that people exhibit outside the lottery. Buying products by brand, for instance. Or the hypocrisy of buying insurance.
I agree with LottoMetro, in that the act of playing the lottery is a highly irrational act so to portray it as anything but would ring false and, truth be told, boring. Yes, Bow-wow's movie looked idiotic but I don't expect anything else from someone who chooses to be called Bow-Wow. Which is why I never saw it. I liked Colin Hanks' lottery movie, though that was more about serial killing.
Fact is,almost every movie made that involves a lot of money has a plot line based on unmitigated greed or stupidity. Maybe lottery movies don't have to be stupid, but there has to be some entertainment value.
I'd rather see a movie based on Bud Post slowly going paranoid, shooting at debt collectors and pouring cement over his wife's jewellery than a movie about Gloria winning and then shopping at Wal-Mart. Stupidity, eccentricity, and greediness is entertaining. It just is.
I think it's human nature to want to pit ones own standards against a person who is given a golden opportunity and proceeds to do things guaranteed to blow through their winnings. The math professor who won and safely invested, bought an affordable car, and stayed in the same house wasn't as interesting as the unemployed homeless man who won and who has a cat fetish and a hatred of baths.
On second thought, I did come up with one TV show that portrayed a lottery winner as a good smart guy. I should have remembered it before because it was one of my favorite TV shows of all time: Lost.
There was also another show on TV that probably no one remembers except me ... "Key West" that aired in January 1993. It was a great show that lasted only 13 episodes ... a great cast playing some great characters.
From Wikipedia - The main character is Seamus O'Neill, played by Fisher Stevens, a factory worker from New Jersey who dreams of being a writer. When he wins the lottery, he uses his newfound wealth to move to Key West to pursue his writing career, where his idol, Hemingway, had lived. Seamus finds the island inhabited by eccentrics. He takes a job as a reporter for The Meteor, a local newspaper.
It took me forever to find a DVD set of all the episodes ... I don't know why it was cancelled, so many shows that I liked never seem to last ... another short lived show was "Mann & Machine" with Yancy Butler and David Andrews from 1992.
From Wikipedia - Mann & Machine is an American science fiction/police drama series that aired for nine episodes on NBC from April 5, 1992 to July 14, 1992.
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Key West (TV Series)
Key West is a short-lived 1993 hour long comedy-drama television series set in Key West, Florida. Thirteen episodes aired on Fox between January and June 1993. It was created by David Beaird and Allan Marcil. The show was produced by Viacom Productions (now CBS Television Studios).
The main character is Seamus O'Neill, played by Fisher Stevens, a factory worker from New Jersey who dreams of being a writer. When he wins the lottery, he uses his newfound wealth to move to Key West to pursue his writing career, where his idol, Hemingway, had lived. Seamus finds the island inhabited by eccentrics. He takes a job as a reporter for The Meteor, a local newspaper.
In addition to Stevens, Jennifer Tilly, Denise Crosby and Brian Thompson led the large ensemble cast as the town's high-class prostitute, conservative mayor and eccentric sheriff, respectively.
Original cast
Seamus O'Neill (Fisher Stevens)
Chaucy Caldwell (Denise Crosby)
Sheriff Cody Jeremiah Jefferson (Brian Thompson)
Dr. Reilly Clarke (Kim Myers)
Abednigo "JoJo" Nabuli (Terrence 'T.C.' Carson)
Savannah Sumner (Jennifer Tilly)
Hector Allegria (Geno Silva)
King Cole (Ivory Ocean)
Paul "Gumbo" Beausoleil (Leland Crooke)
Rikki (Lara Piper)
Hunter Farmer (Michael Covert)
Flame (Jennifer Barlow)
If you can find these shows anywhere, I'm sure you would find them interesting.
CW
I hear the sequel is about the same gal but this time she is in line at store and gets up to the counter and she has $10 to spare and she is about to buy a $10 cash-for-life scratcher but she catches a glance at a poster for some stupid lottery movie and decides to spend the money on a movie ticket instead. The guy in line behind her buys the scratcher instead of wasting his money on the movie ticket and he wins $260,000 a year for life.
Except that they made Hurley's winnings a curse for him, which I think is worse. That show had enough horrible things happening to everyone without making a curse out of one lucky event.