Hold onto your beakers, the 1963 original version of The Nutty Professor, starring comedy legend Jerry Lewis, is getting a reboot.
According to Deadline, the forthcoming film will be produced by the same team behind Scream 5 — that’s Project X folks James Vanderbilt, William Sherak, and Paul Neinstein. As of now, no directors or actors are attached to the project yet.
In the 1963 sci-fi comedy, Lewis played the role of nerdy chemistry professor Julius Kelp, who, thanks to a magic potion, is transformed into a Casanova-like character named Buddy Love. The original flick was envisioned as a parody of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde.
Lewis directed The Nutty Professor, as well as co-wrote the script. It’s been long considered one of Lewis’ best movies, and the film itself was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 2004. Lewis died in August 2017 at the age of 91.
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For millennials such as myself, Eddie Murphy’s 1996 remake of The Nutty Professor was likely their first introduction into that whole, uhh, nutty world. That movie starred Murphy opposite romantic interest Jada Pinkett-Smith and was later followed up with a sequel in 2000’s Nutty Professor II: The Klumps, in which Murphy portrayed multiple characters.
In related news, it was recently confirmed that both Courteney Cox and David Arquette would be reprising their roles in Scream 5. The movie is expected to begin filming later this year, with a tentative release date scheduled for sometime in 2021.
Revisit a trailer for the original Nutty Professor below.
