House Party reboot director will now reboot White Men Can't Jump

If you’re sitting on the rights to an early ‘90s comedy that you’d like to see a modern Hollywood remake of, then you might want to write down the name Charles Kidd II—a.k.a. Calmatic—because he’s apparently the one who can get that sort of thing done… or at least get one greenlit, since he hasn’t actually released one yet.

Calmatic is the director of the still-upcoming House Party remake, which is being produced by LeBron James and his SpringHill Company label, and now Deadline says he’s been tapped to take on another ‘90s comedy remake: White Men Can’t Jump. The original movie, released in 1992 and directed by Ron Shelton, starred Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes as a pair of basketball hustlers in a world where hustling people at basketball can be a surprisingly eventful career.

Deadline doesn’t know what sort of changes will be made to that plot, but it will reportedly “follow the same idea as the original.” (That idea, presumably, is that white men can’t jump, making them bad at basketball, which is a stereotype that a basketball hustler like Woody Harrelson is more than happy to exploit.)

We don’t know who might star in this movie, since it will be hard to fill the shoes of Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes in any performance—the MCU had to turn to freakin’ Mahershala Ali to try and live up to Snipes’ Blade—but there’s probably some time for Calmatic to figure that out. House Party hasn’t even been released yet.

This new White Men Can’t Jump was written by Kenya Barris and Doug Hall. Calmatic’s career pre-House Party involved directing a lot of music videos, including one for a reasonably popular little tune called “Old Town Road.” (The real one, not the one with Red Dead Redemption 2 footage, which has apparently been somewhat scrubbed from the internet.)