Having already done six impossible things before breakfast, Alice Through The Looking Glass director James Bobin has now signed on for the mother of all improbable tasks—directing a 21 Jump Street/Men In Black crossover without either Jump Street masterminds Phil Lord and Chris Miller or MiB stars Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith being attached.
The premise of the new movie—which, we’d like to emphasize, is an actual multi-million dollar project that’s in development, and not just one of the silly fake sequels from the end of 22 Jump Street—was revealed during the Sony hacks back in 2014, a fact which apparently hasn’t dissuaded anyone involved from pursuing the idea. Jump Street stars Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum are both attached to the project, while Sony is reportedly looking around for some A-list stars willing to wink their way through the job of replacing Smith and Jones, who won’t be part of the film.
The movie will be Bobins’ fourth feature; he got his start as a writer and director on Ali G and Flight Of The Conchords, before moving into movies with 2011’s The Muppets. He also directed (and wrote) that film’s mostly adequate 2014 sequel, before continuing his stint with Disney on the second live-action Alice In Wonderland film. Now, he’ll be taking over the increasingly ludicrous Jump Street franchise from Miller and Lord, who are currently busy working on a stand-alone Han Solo film that they apparently don’t want to also mash into this thing, even though really, at this point, it wouldn’t be all that surprising if they did.