Back in 2004 Luke Greenfield showed promise with the better-than-it-should-have-been sex comedy The Girl Next Door, but since then we’ve been waiting for the director repeat that same magic. Unfortunately his last effort, Something Borrowed, fell prey to all the generic rom-com trappings he avoided in his previous feature. He’s now looking for his next feature and has lined up two possibilities, Variety reports.
With the connective tissue being Mark Ruffalo, producer of his directorial debut Sympathy for Delicious, Andrew Renz, has linked up with Greenfield for the dramedy The Last Bachelor, which “follows a single man in his late 30s who drops everything to seek out his soulmate. When he finally meets “the one,” he finds himself behaving as if he had a ticking biological clock.”
Then the other project, just receiving a polish by Stuart Blumberg, scribe of Ruffalo’s The Kids Are All Right (coincidence? I think not. Actually, it probably is.), an action-comedy over at 20th Century Fox that is now getting ready to cast. Blumberg also wrote The Girl Next Door, and he helped out with Greenfield and Nicholas Thomas’ original script, which is a “truly grounded action-comedy balancing comedy with serious danger.” Greenfield added, “We’ve been writing it as a real character piece about two buddies who didn’t become the guys they wanted to be and now they have a chance to do so, but with extreme consequences.”
The former project seems a bit too much on the high-concept rom-com side, but I’d be interested to see what Greenfield does in the action field. If he adds as much heart as he did for Girl Next Door, we could certainly use more of his kind in the studio directing arena. Considering he is re-teaming with Blumberg, it is an additional source of promise. And for another Ruffalo connection, Blumberg’s directorial debut Thanks for Sharing, starring the actor, will likely debut on the fall festival circuit.
Are you looking forward to what Greenfield has in store?