Well, we now know what Bill Murray whispered to Scarlett Johansson at the end of Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation 15 years ago: “I’ll be re-teaming with Sofia for another project emphasizing my dad-ness in 2019, but you’ll be replaced by Rashida Jones. Also, Apple will have something called a ‘streaming service’ at that point, but nobody will have seen it yet even though they’re producing tons of content for it.”
It’s not nearly as poetic as “I have to be leaving, but I won’t let that come between us. Okay?” But it’s true: According to Deadline, Murray and Coppola are reuniting for a film titled On the Rocks, co-starring the aforementioned Jones, that’s being developed by A24 and Apple as a part of their multi-year deal to produce content for the latter’s soon-to-debut streaming service.
What’s it about? Well, Deadline gives this brief summary: “[t]he movie follows a young mother who reconnects with her larger than life playboy father on an adventure through New York.” We’re sure that Coppola has something a little more insightful planned for this than that logline might suggest, but we guess we’ll just have to wait and see how this project develops. Production is expected to begin in the spring in NYC, so we imagine we’ll be hearing more in short order.
This’ll be Coppola and Murray’s second pairing, after Lost in Translation and the underwhelming 2015 Netflix special A Very Murray Christmas, and it’ll be Coppola’s second time working with A24 after The Bling Ring. It’s still odd to think of A24 as an Apple partner, for whatever reason, but we imagine this will be a little more fruitful for them than their DirecTV deal. It’ll give them the assets of a trillion-dollar company, after all. There’s no word on when the service will release, but we imagine we’ll hear more about it this summer or fall right around the various product events that Apple has every year.
Featured image from ‘Lost in Translation’ by Focus Features via MoviestillsDB.