I can’t help but wonder how on earth are Phillips and the gang going to make Belushi relevant?

Todd Phillips Wants A ‘Renegade’ JOHN BELUSHI Biopic
Posted On September - 4 - 2010


As much as I’m looking forward to the new biopic of John Belushi, produced by Todd Phillips (The Hangover), I can’t help but wonder how on earth are Phillips and the gang going to make Belushi relevant? Unless the film had Belushi with vampire fangs or say a few magic spells or have superpower, most kids today won’t even know who this legend was, they’d go ‘John who?’, either that or they’d mistake him for his brother Jim.
Steven Conrad (The Pursuit Of Happyness) is developing the script and though it’s not confirmed whether or not Phillips would direct, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that he’d say yes, in a recent chat with MTV, Phillips explained their approach..

“Our goal is not to do a traditional biopic approach with it that people expect, whether you’re talking about ‘Walk the Line’ or ‘Ray.’ All good movies, but our goal is not to make that typical biopic. We want to make a movie that, if John Belushi saw it, he would be happy that it captured his spirit. Sometimes I feel that they don’t entirely capture the spirit of the person they’re about. Our goal is to capture the spirit of Belushi, not necessarily make a straight-ahead biopic.”
“Steve Conrad, who’s a f–king brilliant writer, is working on a story for it.”
“It could mean that. There are a lot of ways to interpret it. One of the reasons I’m being a bit vague is because we haven’t nailed it yet. It’s in early stages. I’m really talking about the very television-narrative approach that a lot of biopics take. We don’t want to do that. We’re trying to take a very renegade approach to who I think was one of the most renegade comedy actors of all time.”

Good.. we could use unconventional biopic especially for one like John Belushi. Not just storytelling-wise but also visually, If Phillips wants to make this into something that Belushi would like if he were alive today, then it should focus more on the laughs and not so much on his struggle with his demons a.k.a addiction.
It could be his life depicted through a series of SNL type-sketches.. or they could single out maybe a few years of his life, his rise to power and then end the movie on a high note and leave the rest in the end credit notes.
The million dollar question of course… which actor working in Hollywood today is worthy enough to play the man of the hour?..

“It’s about nailing the script down at this point. If it’s a new face or if it’s someone people are familiar with, we haven’t figured that out yet. It’s not even so much about nailing down the script as the renegade approach to a renegade actor.”

Some of the names previously rumored were Jack Black, Jonah Hill, even Seth Rogen.
But I’m all for the idea of casting a new actor for this,.. he has to be perfect though.. no less than will do.