Spiritual sequels are Richard Linklater‘s new forte, it seems. Following 2016 favorite Everybody Wants Some!!, the writer-director is focusing his attention on Last Flag Flying, an adaptation of Darryl Ponsican’s sequel to his famed novel The Last Detail, itself the source for Hal Ashby’s beloved Jack Nicholson-starrer. (You’ve at least seen the poster, surely.) But we won’t be seeing the actor again, and this shouldn’t run the risk of besmirching the original – what we’re getting, rather, is a “sort of” follow-up. [THR]
The project has been in Linklater’s sights for ten years — during which time he’d hoped to reunite Nicholson and Randy Quaid while replacing the deceased Otis Young with Morgan Freeman — and will star Bryan Cranston, Steve Carell, and Laurence Fishburne, with former Naval Petty Officers Billy “Badass” Budusky and Richard “Mule” Mulhall once again partnered with Larry Meadows, the man they’d taken to a Naval prison decades prior. Meadows now needs to return the body of his son from Iraq, which “sends them back retracing their journey from Norfolk, Virginia, to Portsmouth, New Hampshire.”
Amazon Studios will finance Last Flag Flying, and production’s to begin in November.