Jennifer Aniston and Dennis Quaid probably joining that Jackie Brown sort-of-prequel

Deadline reports that Jennifer Aniston and Dennis Quaid will likely join the cast of the Elmore Leonard adaptation Switch. Based on Leonard's 1978 novel The Switch, it's a crime comedy about a kidnapping scheme that goes wrong when a husband (Quaid) refuses to pay the ransom for the wife (Aniston) that he doesn't want back, so she teams up with the kidnappers to get revenge, using what she knows about his shady dealings to help bleed him dry. And as previously reported, Aniston is likely indirectly responsible for the title swap from The Switch to Switch, and her participation in this project definitely won’t clear up any of that future confusion.

And of course, all this is more interesting than it might be otherwise because Switch’s same kidnapper characters were seen in Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown, which was based on Leonard's 1992 Rum Punch. As we mentioned earlier, John Hawkes and Yasiin Bey (a.k.a. The Artist Formerly Known As Mos Def) will co-star as younger versions of the characters played by Robert De Niro and Samuel L. Jackson in that movie. And yes, it's arguable as to whether this is enough to call Switch a Jackie Brown "prequel"—especially considering Rum Punch came out 13 years later. Still, it's a nicer way of pointing out the story's literary and cinematic antecedents than saying its premise will seem imaginative only to anyone who's never seen Ruthless People, 1967’s The Happening (the one without the killer trees), or the 1930 British film Too Many Crooks, or who was out sick the day everyone else in fourth grade read "The Ransom Of Red Chief."