Kid Cudi to write, direct, and star in Netflix movie produced by Jeymes Samuel and JAY-Z
The movie is like the song "Pursuit Of Happiness," but it's a movie
The Netflix model has a lot of problems, but one thing it’s sometimes good at is giving creators opportunities to make passion projects that most other studios/streaming platforms wouldn’t. That’s sometimes a “for better or worse” thing also, but maybe this is one of the “for better” times. Either way, the latest person to get a nice Netflix gig is Scott “Kid Cudi” Mescudi, who will be writing, directing, and starring in an upcoming movie called Teddy.
This will be Mescudi’s feature directorial debut, and he said in a social media post that it will be like if you took his song “Pursuit Of Happiness” and wrote a movie about it, with him adding, “I added a lot of my own personal struggles and experiences in it, so this film is very close to my heart.” He also says that he hopes that it will “help people in the same ways” that his music has, and while it will be a comedy, he will “sprinkle some real shit in there.”
That doesn’t tell us much of anything about it (we’d guess it’ll be a loose, comedic take on Kid Cudi’s real life, but about a guy named Teddy), but the Variety story about this points out that Teddy will be produced by The Harder They Fall director Jeymes Samuel and JAY-Z (among other people). Kid Cudi previously contributed a track to Samuel’s Western, and he appeared in Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up, so he—like so many actors and filmmakers before him—is currently enjoying the “work for Netflix one time, work for Netflix 100 times” career bump.
That’s about all the important stuff we know about Teddy, but Kid Cudi’s Twitter announcement did also have a logo attached to it. All that tells us is that it’s called Teddy, though, and we knew that.