Always determined to stretch himself as an actor—a joke about his height that’s just waiting to be adapted into a major motion picture—Kevin Hart is in talks for what would be one of around a dozen new projects he’s been attached to recently, this one an action-comedy with Jamie Foxx. Variety reports that Hart and Foxx may star in Black Phantom, a film about a double-crossed hitman who teams up with the hitman who was hired to kill him. Not surprisingly, the movie’s producer and longtime champion, Will Packer, wants to hire his Ride Along team of Hart and director Tim Story, with that trio having already enjoyed success by partnering Kevin Hart with someone who’d like to see him die.
Black Phantom has been around since at least 2009, when it was the story of a “Caucasian hitman” who turns to an “African-American hitman”—a hitman whose name is therefore just the way his coworkers refer to him, to differentiate him from the other Phantom in accounting. (Look, they’re not proud of it; it’s just faster.) It’s unknown what casting Hart in what is presumably the “Caucasian” role will mean for adjusting what seems to be the script’s emphasis on the characters’ racial friction, though we’d guess a Find/Replace on “white” jokes to “short” jokes.