Deadline reports that Warner Bros. is developing a You’ve Got Mail remake. Jason Orley (I Want You Back) is directing and writing the current draft. Variety later confirmed the project.
The hard part will be the premise. In Nora Ephron’s 1998 film, Tom Hanks plays a corporate bookselling magnate who threatens the independent children’s bookshop owner Meg Ryan plays. The two fall for each other as pen pals online. Deadline framed the remake as a question of what the story looks like “decades on from the heyday of AOL”. ScreenRant pointed out that with dating apps everywhere, it’s unclear how Orley will update it for younger audiences.
[T]he rom-com captured the emergence of email as a medium for intimacy, long before dating apps were around, and spoke to the ’90s trend of big-box bookstores squeezing out independent shops.
Deadline
Orley’s draft builds on an earlier screenplay by Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont, the pair behind Can’t Hardly Wait and Josie and the Pussycats. Neal Moritz is producing with Tania Landau through Original Film, fresh from the Emily Henry adaptation Beach Read. Orley knows the genre: I Want You Back was an Amazon rom-com with Charlie Day, Jenny Slate, and Gina Rodriguez, and his earlier film was Big Time Adolescence. He’s just finished post-production on Close Personal Friends, an Amazon comedy starring Brie Larson, Jack Quaid, Lilly Collins, and Henry Golding.
Details of the new take are being kept under wraps, so we don’t know the plot, the cast, a release date, or whether it’s headed for cinemas or streaming.
The original was itself an adaptation, based on Miklós László’s play Parfumerie and its film adaptation, The Shop Around the Corner. In December 1998, Warner Bros. released it, and it grossed over $250 million worldwide. The studio is also returning to other older titles, with a live-action Jetsons movie starring Jim Carrey on its slate and the Looney Tunes hybrid Coyote vs. Acme, after years in development.
For Hanks and Ryan, the film was their third pairing after Joe Versus the Volcano and Sleepless in Seattle, and their last with Ephron.
