Grease Prequel on the Way for Some Reason
It's money. The reason is money.
Good news, everyone! That Grease prequel you’ve been dreaming about all these years – right? – is coming to a theater near you soon, according to THR.
Paramount’s Summer Loving will explore the events detailed in “Summer Nights,” the relentless earworm Danny (John Travolta) and Sandy (Olivia Newton-John) sang to their respective friends in Randal Kleiser’s 1978 hit, Grease. The retrospectively problematic one about how they first met and fell for each other, and whether Sandy put up a fight. Honestly, just typing these words has created a full Naked Lunch moment for your writer.
How do we know Summer Loving will be a key project for Paramount in the next couple of years? Well, the studio has hired John August to write the film. August is behind Guy Ritchie’s new live-action Aladdin film, has written copious screenplays for Tim Burton – including Big Fish, Corpse Bride, and Charlie And The Chocolate Factory – and is also one of Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark‘s scribblers. If you have fond memories of McG’s early-00s Charlie’s Angels movies, chances are he wrote those, too.
No one is attached to direct Summer Loving yet, but if it’s a musical, Paramount will likely be hoping for even a tiny taste of that The Greatest Showman success when it’s finally released. The studio is in the midst of re-thinking its strategy at the moment, and has Terminator: Dark Fate, Sonic The Hedgehog, and Rocketman still to come this year. 2020 will bring us sequels to Top Gun and A Quiet Place, and the not-too-distant future is filled with the further adventures of Ethan Hunt in the Mission: Impossible franchise.
You may now begin your dream/nightmare casting of young Danny Zuko and Sandy Olsson. Resistance is futile.
We’ll bring you more on Summer Loving as it’s unveiled.
Written by
Kirsten Howard has paid their dues. Yes sir, the check is in the mail.