According to The Hollywood Reporter, 50-year-old man Will Ferrell has signed on to star in an American adaptation of wildly popular Swedish novel The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out The Window And Disappeared. The book was already adapted into a movie in Sweden, where it became one of the country’s highest-grossing films of all time, but the American Empire can’t just sit idly by while Sweden is turning its popular books into popular movies. That’s how we got David Fincher’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and it’s how we’re getting this remake of The 100-Year-Old Man.
In addition to starring in the movie, Ferrell will be producing it alongside Adam McKay and Jessica Elbaum through their Gary Sanchez Productions studio, with Narcos’ Jason George writing the screenplay. It doesn’t sound like a director is attached, though, so the project doesn’t seem to be very far along.
The original book is sort of like a more “darkly comedic” spin on Forrest Gump, with the eponymous 100-year-old man being an explosives expert whose window-based disappearance somehow leads to the revelation that he was in the background of countless important events from the 20th century. Much like Forrest Gump, he also bumps into famous historical figures, including Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill.