Josh Gad to star in fat camp comedy

By William Hughes | February 10, 2016 | 12:20am

Aux Features Film

Taking his mandatory turn in Hollywood’s coveted-yet-pitied “Funny Fat Guy” slot—also known as The Kevin James Memorial Acting Prison—Frozen and Pixels star Josh Gad has signed on for a new movie about an adult man attending a weight-loss camp. Written by his old 1600 Penn cohorts, Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit, the film will see Gad play a guy attending a wellness retreat in the hopes of losing weight and bettering his life, who’s then forced to persist after “things go awry.” (Presumably, things turn dark when the guys at the camp get into a bitter feud with the Monk Academy across the lake.)

Gad will likely start work on the new comedy—titled Heavy Duty, in what someone probably thought was a stab at subtlety—after he finishes up work on Disney’s live-action Beauty And The Beast and his role as Roger Ebert in Will Ferrell’s movie about the making of Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls. The new movie is actually the second corpulence-obsessed comedy to go into development in the last few weeks; Universal picked up a similar premise—about a bunch of fat dads trying to stave off their inevitable heart attacks—from a trio of Family Guy writers back at the end of January.