Roughly two and a half years after Gentlemen Broncos already started to dissipate from our memory, Variety tells us that Jared Hess (also of Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre fame) has reemerged for what’s easily his biggest job yet. Per their word, he’s signed with Disney for The Pet, a sci-fi family comedy that Scott Rudin has been trying to get off the ground since 2007.

Though Tim Dowling (This Means War, Role Models) rewrote work from Matt Lieberman, Hess has been pegged to write and direct the story of “a man who’s abducted by aliens, taken to their planet and turned into a family pet.” From that brief summation alone do we realize that it’s miles apart from the kind of material with which Rudin has built a big reputation; it even looks to break with the “we shot this using a dirty lens in some undesirable location” aesthetic Hess has failed to build his own reputation with. If The Pet forces him to abandon this and just make a movie that I can easily sit through, this project has already accrued some goodwill on my part.

What do you make of The Pet? Are you interested in more work from Hess?