Ben Stiller and Stuart Cornfeld's Red Hour Strike Multi-Movie Deal with Dreamworks

By James Wray Dec 9, 2004, 16:09 GMT

DreamWorks has given Red Hour partners Ben Stiller and Stuart Cornfeld a three-year renewal on their first-look deal. As part of this DreamWorks is going ahead with Tropic Thunder as the next film Stiller potentially directs and toplines. It is based on an original script he wrote with Etan Cohen and Justin Thoreau.

Stiller says "Thunder" is a "a comedy about five actors who go on location and find themselves relying on their boot camp experiences when they get stuck in a real war-like situation." Stiller will play one of the actors.

The studio has also aquired The Ruins, a horror novel by A Simple Plan author Scott Smith. Red Hour has set Smith to adapt his book, to be published next year. The book is about a group of tourists on a hike that turns into a nightmare.

The first Red Hour movie to go into production under the DreamWorks banner will be Date School, a comedy Red Hour is producing with Contrafilm. Miguel Arteta is directing.

Red Hour is also looking to make Bad Decline, Stiller's pet project, which is based on a George Saunders novella about the trouble a wimpy administrator gets into when he unwittingly hires a trained killer to stop gangs from terrorizing the patrons of a Civil War theme park. Saunders is adapting the script.

So a whole lot coming from Red Hour over the next year.

Source: Variety