While Hollywood filmmakers can barely be bothered to throw lukewarm coffee in the face of actual interns, fictional interns are suddenly all the rage, as the studios regard those many recent complaints they’ve received about the humiliating indignities of unpaid labor and realize, hey, that would make a pretty funny movie. The burgeoning trend recently kicked off with the news that Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson could once again bro down on some sociopolitical bro-mmentary in Shawn Levy’s The Internship (formerly The Interns), playing two fortysomething dudes forced to take unpaid lower-rung jobs at a tech company, and face all of their many personal failings for approximately 10 minutes. Most likely that will be resolved as soon as they devise a plan to prank one of those know-it-all business school grads and really show them the business, if you know what we mean.
And barely 24 hours after that film was confirmed, Deadline reports that Paramount has purchased the very similarly titled The Intern to be directed by Nancy Meyers and star Tina Fey, plus the entire contents of a Williams-Sonoma catalog, most likely. Meyers’ film will find Fey playing the founder of a fashion-based e-business saddled with a seventy-something, widower intern as part of a senior citizen outreach program, as so many fashion-based e-businesses so often take part in. Meyers says she sees the film as more about the platonic, paternal friendship Fey develops with the yet-to-be-cast older man—who will not be Alec Baldwin this time, obviously—rather than, as one might suspect, demonstrating that The Internship shows that men be internin’ like this, while The Intern is about how women be internin’ like this. Both films will, however, explore how interns deserve a fairer shake, except on the actual film sets.