It's not a male dance revue with only one buff dude, so here are 3 competing Chippendales projects
It’s been nearly a decade since Magic Mike, and it looks like Hollywood has finally gotten around to ripping it off (but not like one might rip off a shirt) with a shocking and true story about hunky male dance revues. In October, we heard about Dev Patel getting involved with Craig Gillespie’s long-in-the-works movie about Chippendales founder Somen “Steve” Banerjee and the various murders and attempted murders that occurred during his rise and fall, and today—almost as if the story of Banerjee and Chippendales had just gone into the public domain like The Great Gatsby—two additional Chippendales projects about shirtless men and murder have been announced.
One is an eight-episode Hulu series called Immigrant that will star the newly buff Kumail Nanjiani as Banerjee, with Variety saying it will “detail the insane, darkly comedic, crime-ridden story behind the unique male revue that became a cultural phenomenon.” The series is written by Robert Siegel, who also wrote Hulu’s Pam & Tommy, which is being directed by none other than Craig Gillespie (the same Craig Gillespie from the other Chippendales project we mentioned a paragraph ago).
Turning this into a three-man revue is Discovery+, which just announced Curse Of Chippendales, a four-part true-crime documentary series from Simon and Jonathan Chinn that will utilize “video and photo archives, never-before-seen footage, and a nostalgia-filled soundtrack” to tell the story of the dark side of Chippendales. The Deadline story features several quotes talking about the soundtrack, actually, meaning there where probably some good licensing deals involved in making this happen, and now we’re wondering if the Nanjiani and Patel projects are going to have similarly good soundtracks. Probably not, right? They’d talk about it otherwise.
It doesn’t sound like any of these have a premiere date yet, which means the race is on! Only one can be the true “dark side of Chippendales” thing, and whichever two come out later will forever be the other “dark side of Chippendales” things… unless one of the later ones is way better than whichever one comes out first. Or if they come out so far apart from each other that nobody remembers the others. Maybe there are a few different ways to play this?