It’s no surprise that Hollywood seems to have learned the wrong lessons from the success of Barbie (which worked because there was a fun creative vision behind it), and now we’re facing an even deeper mess built around the brand. Next up: The Cola Wars, written by famed producer Steven Spielberg and directed by comedy master Judd Apatow.
To be fair, Deadline reports that this will be a movie based on the true story behind the conflict between Coke and Pepsi, but whatever, who cares?
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Spielberg will produce the project through his Amblin Entertainment, which has been in development at Sony for some time. The studio bought the project earlier this year for more than $1 million “as a pitch.” The Coke Wars (working title) is currently being written by Jason Schulman (Apple’s Acapulco) and Ben Quinn (Netflix’s The Explanation). Quinn also worked on Cars 2 and Cars 3 for Pixar.
According to Deadline, the film aims to tell “the true story of Pepsi’s challenge to Coca-Cola’s century-long dominance as the world’s number one cola. It pulls back the curtain on the ‘Cola Wars’ of the mid-1980s, which included Michael Jackson’s fire accident and the fiasco of New Coke. It’s the ultimate underdog story of the second-largest competitor in history (Pepsi) fighting for the top spot.” Sure, there’s some potential in a rich, fast-paced “true story” movie involving two famous brands, but so many such films have failed in the past that I don’t know why the money wasn’t spent on developing something else.
For Apatow, this could be a chance to bounce back after the failure of his last film, Bubble. He’s still got plenty of energy in the comedy-drama field, though, so Hollywood hasn’t given up on him just yet. Deadline cites Ben Affleck’s Air (“the story of Nike’s battle with Michael Jordan for a sneaker line that changes the company”) as inspiration for Cola Wars, but Amazon lost a ton of money on that movie, so this one is far from a guaranteed box office success. What the hell are we doing here?
