The Best Football Movie Of All Time Getting Remake… Again
Remakes are nothing new in Hollywood—even classics like Frankenstein (1931) and The Wizard of Oz (1939) were remakes of earlier silent films of the same name. Some movies like proto-slasher Black Christmas (1974) get remade not once (2006) but twice (2019)! Now Deadline reports football classic The Longest Yard is set to join Black Christmas as one of the rare films to be remade more than once.
The Longest Yard Is Being Remade For A Second Time
The 1974 Burt Reynolds original was remade once already in 2005—this time with Adam Sandler leading the way. The Longest Yard version 3.0 is currently being written by Rodney Barnes for Paramount Pictures. Barnes is no stranger to the gridiron having previously written and executive produced Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty for HBO.
The re-remake comes from production company Gunpowder & Sky, a company led by CEO Van Toffler one of the executive producers on the first The Longest Yard remake in 2005. Toffler worked for MTV’s parent company Viacom at the time where he first met former MTV Films boss David Gale. Gale now works with Toffler at Gunpowder & Sky and is again collaborating with his friend on yet another remake of The Longest Yard.
Burt Reynolds Starred In 1974’s The Longest Yard
Conceived as a sports comedy set in a prison, The Longest Yard (1974) was directed by Robert Aldrich off of a script by Tracy Keenan Wynn. The movie featured Burt Reynolds as a washed-up NFL quarterback named Paul “Wrecking” Crewe” who, after finding himself sentenced to 18 months in prison, decides to put together a football team made up of inmates to play a game against the prison’s guards.
Adam Sandler Leads The Team In The 2005 Remake
The 2005 version traded Reynolds for Sandler—although Burt still has a small role in the film—but kept the rest of the story relatively faithful to the original. Sandler’s Paul Crewe still puts together a football team of inmates called “The Mean Machine” to play the guards, the only differences are the cast and more modern jokes—by 2005 standards, at least.
This Marks The Fifth Time This Football Story Had Been Adapted
Both of the previous versions of The Longest Yard were released by Paramount, making it a no-brainer that the studio would again be the driving force behind this new remake. If we really want to get technical—and this is the internet, so we practically have to—this new Paramount-produced remake of The Longest Yard will actually be the fourth time the movie has been remade and the fifth iteration of the story overall.
Two remakes of The Longest Yard have been filmed outside of the US—both trading the uniquely North American sport of football for soccer. Other than a change in the type of sport being played, Mean Machine, a 2001 British film starring real-life soccer star turned actor Vinnie Jones, and the 2015 Egyptian production Captain Masr, are both fairly faithful adaptations of the original The Longest Yard.
The Longest Yard Remake Has No Release Date Scheduled Yet
It’s not yet clear when fans can expect this new remake of The Longest Yard to hit theaters or streaming. Barnes currently has several different projects in various stages of development. These projects include penning an adaptation of the Chris Leslie-Hynan novel Ride Around Shining for Jonah Hill’s production company Strong Baby. The film will star LaKeith Stanfield and is being developed for Netflix.
In addition, the producer/writer is hard at work writing a miniseries based on the life of golf legend Tiger Woods. Between that and Gunpowder & Sky’s other projects like the Elisabeth Moss film Her Smell and the Nick Offerman-starring Heart Beats Loud it could be a while before there are any updates on the newest The Longest Yard remake.
