After not having much of an opinion on her, Scarlett Johansson has risen to the top of my “favorite actresses” list over the last few years. It’s due to a combination of behind the scenes strategizing I appreciate—she’s engineered a career resurgence every young actress should study—and making movies I like. I like her in the Marvel movies, and I LOVE her in stuff like Her and Under the Skin, two of my favorite movies of the last decade, probably. I’m not crazy about her being in The Ghost in the Shell, but that’s more of an industry problem than a ScarJo problem. That one movie aside, every other thing she’s got cooking is interesting. Hail, Caesar! looks great, The Jungle Book looks beautiful, if nothing else, and Captain America: Civil War has incredible potential.
But dominating the action and drama genres isn’t enough—ScarJo is coming for comedy. She’s in negotiations to star in an R-rated comedy for Sony called Move That Body, a newly-Black Listed script—a big deal script, then, but so was Pan, once upon a time—from Broad City director Lucia Aniello and her writing partner, Paul W. Downs. It’s about a group of friends on a bachelorette weekend in Miami who accidentally kill a male stripper. I can hear the pitch—Magic Mike meets Weekend at Bernie’s. So it’s an R-rated comedy about accidental murder from one of the minds behind Broad City and starring Scarlett Johansson? I’m in.
Attached: Scarlett as a fictional home shopping TV host in a parody infomercial in support of the (SHOPATHON) RED campaign, a month-long holiday shopping extravaganza that launched on World AIDS Day on December 1 2015.
