Spike Jonze has always made it pretty clear that Hollywood needs him more than he needs it. Looking down his extensive filmography—and even filtering out the dozens upon dozens of music videos on which he built his reputation, and which he continues to dabble in even as films like Her and Being John Malkovich made him a household name amongst the nerdier kinds of house—and you can see a guy who pretty much just makes and produces the things he wants to make or produce. (Which, in the last few years, has included a Beastie Boys documentary, some Vice projects, and basically everything the Jackass guys have produced.) Now, it sounds like a thing Jonze wanted to make has now become the other thing, as Deadline reports that a big, secretive TV project Jonze was developing with Netflix has just been killed, possibly by his own disinterest.
It’s always a little weird to report on something whose major defining feature is that nobody knows the first goddamn thing about it, but Jonze apparently began working with the streamer on an untitled TV series back in 2022. And although no other famous people in Hollywood had been publicly attached to it—despite rumors of guys like Brad Pitt and Jonze’s old pal Joaquin Phoenix being interested—it was apparently going well enough that production was getting ready to hire a casting director with an eye toward starting filming on 2025. On something. We don’t know what!
Deadline reports on “sources” that say Netflix had convened a writer’s room for the untitled series at some point, and that things may have fallen apart after Jonze supposedly stepped back from the project. (Also, Puck reported a few years back that the series was a “lavish” and “ambitious” sci-fi series, although, y’know, grain of salt.) The upshot of all this is that Spike Jonze was almost definitely working on a TV show for Netflix, and now something has happened where he won’t be working on it, probably, unless he decides to come back to it. Which he probably won’t, for now.
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