Will Ferrell will soon return to the North Pole—either before or after patrolling the U.S.-Mexico border—for a comedy about an impromptu Arctic expedition. The untitled film comes from Sony Pictures and Temple Hill producers Wyck Godfrey and Marty Bowen, who are adapting a Guy Lawson article in The New York Times about a real-life gaggle of Minnesotan pals who set off for the North Pole on snowmobiles. They successfully reached the North Pole, and the trip only (temporarily) claimed the life of their whiskey, which ended up frozen by the subzero temperatures.
The film is being “built around” Ferrell, who will play Ralph Plaisted, an insurance salesman who teamed up with his friends—a doctor, a car dealer, a geology teacher, and a strapping French Canadian—to make the journey in 1968. The ersatz explorers even managed to snag sponsors “for whiskey, designer watches and the dehydrated food used by the Apollo program.” But the group failed a stress test, as well as to get the blessing of the National Geographic Society, which was “protective of the 1909 Robert Peary expedition it had backed.” Even after completed, the momentous journey wasn’t met with much fanfare in 1968, presumably because the friends failed to bring back proof of Santa Claus’ existence.