Like it or not, Liam Neeson's Naked Gun remake is officially coming in 2025

We need to ask ourselves, as a nation/world/people who are going to have to collectively live through this shit: Do we want Liam Neeson remaking The Naked Gun? (Not that our desires necessarily matter in this case: ABC News reports this weekend that Neeson’s remake of the long-running cop comedy franchise has now been officially set for a July 2025 by Paramount Pictures, with The Lonely Island’s Akiva Schaffer directing.)

There are arguments on both sides of the equation—the most obvious “pro” one being the ways Neeson’s career mimics that of his similarly initialed predecessor in the role of Police Squad! detective Frank Drebin, Leslie Nielsen. Both men spent years primarily being viewed as dramatic actors, with Nielsen playing the heavy for decades before Airplane! team Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker noticed how well his pitch-perfect deadpan worked for comedy. Neeson’s career has similarly traveled far afield over the last 50 years, but almost all of those roles have benefited from his ability to withhold or deliver reactions in exactly the quantities required—a gift for comedy, as he’s demonstrated more than once. And Schaffer is a known comedy talent himself at this point, between directing Popstar, multiple episodes of I Think You Should Leave, and even that Chip ‘n Dale movie people genuinely liked from a few years back—so there’s no reason to worry he’d be the problem here.

The bigger question, to our mind, is whether Naked Gun itself is still a fit for the modern comedy world. Not in a dopey “They don’t let you make jokes like that!” anymore sense—the series was always more interested in rapid-fire silliness than anything especially profane or offensive—but in a wider sense of how studio comedies get made these days. There’s a reason, for instance, that ZAZ themselves eventually devolved into the Scary Movie franchise; there’s something about the Naked Gun “throw everything at the wall, every second, and see what sticks” approach that’s fallen a bit out of step with current-day comedy. (See, for instance, the lukewarm reception to TBS’s Angie Tribeca, a show that tried to be a modern Police Squad! to a nearly actionable extent, and then just sort of vanished, despite a genuinely hilarious performance from Rashida Jones.)

Again, though, Paramount is making this thing, no matter what we say: Schaffer will be working from a script he wrote with Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, who also wrote Chip ‘n Dale.