Opening Christmas Day is director Andy Fickman’s (You Again) family comedy Parental Guidance.   The film stars Billy Crystal and Bette Midler as two grandparents who have a hard time finding middle ground with their three modernized grandchildren.  Marisa Tomei and Tom Everett Scott play the parents.  For more on the film, here’s the trailer.

During the recent Los Angeles press day I spoke to Fickman.  He talked about how he got involved in the project, how the project changed from what Billy Crystal originally pitched him, improv on set, deleted scenes and future projects.  Hit the jump to watch.

The first trailer for the family comedy Parental Guidance has been released.  The film stars Billy Crystal and Bette Midler as two grandparents who have a hard time finding middle ground with their three modernized grandchildren.  The predictable one-liners and nut shots are prevalent in this trailer, but there also looks to be a bit of genuine heart to the film that’s kind of appealing.  The story seems less about the shenanigans that occur when the grandparents babysit and more about the generational gap between their style of parenting and how their daughter raises her children.  When thinking over the library of family films that we’ve all been dragged to during the holidays over the years, Parental Guidance could be worse.

Hit the jump to watch the trailer.  Directed by Andy Fickman (You Again), the film also stars Marisa Tomei and Tom Everett Scott.  Parental Guidance opens on Christmas Day.

Director Andy Fickman (She’s the Man) is on board to film a remake of the 1995 German comedy, Over My Dead Body (Nur über meine Leiche).  The original, written by Rainier Matsutani and Sebastian Niemann and starring Christoph M. Ohrt and Katja Riemann, featured a wife who was fed up with her husband’s womanizing to the point of hiring a contract killer to murder him.  Once dead, the husband makes a deal with Death in order to earn a second chance at life.  The catch?  He only has three days to heal the hearts of three women he once took advantage of.  Variety reports that Entourage scribes Jeremy Miller and Dan Cohn will handle scripting duties.  Fickman’s domestic comedy, Parental Guidance with Billy Crystal and Bette Midler opens Christmas Day of this year.  Hit the jump to see the original trailer (in German and featuring, oddly, a turkey puppet) and poster for Over My Dead Body.

Marisa Tomei has signed on to join director Andy Fickman’s (You Again) family comedy Us & Them. Also starring Billy Crystal, Bette Midler and Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark‘s Bailee Madison, the pic pegs Crystal and Midler as old school grandparents who have a hard time finding a middle ground with their three modernized grandchildren. According to Variety, Tomei will take on the role of Crystal and Midler’s daughter, Alice, whose rocky relationship with her parents is ultimately addressed (and most likely smoothed out) as a result of her kids and parents learning to co-exist.

The project’s most recent script comes courtesy of City Slickers writers Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel. Production is set to get underway in Atlanta later this month. As for Tomei, she can next be seen alongside George Clooney, Ryan Gosling, Paul Giamatti, Evan Rachel Wood and Philip Seymour Hoffman in Clooney’s political drama The Ides of March which opens on October 7th.

Bette Midler and Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark star Bailee Madison have signed on to join Billy Crystal in the family comedy Us & Them. The project, which has been in development for quite some time, re-teams Crystal (who hasn’t toplined a film in over ten years) with his City Slickers writers Lowell Gantz and Babaloo Mandel. The story revolves around a Fresno AAA baseball broadcaster who is tasked with caring for his three grandchildren alongside his wife (with whom he’s going through a separation). The flick will explore the generational gap between the parenting styles of grandparents and their children.

Variety reports that Midler will play Crystal’s estranged wife, while 11-year-old Madison will take on the role of one of their grandchildren. Andy Fickman (You Again) is directing the co-production between 20^th Century Fox and Walden Media. Production is set to get underway later this month in Atlanta.

Director/writer/producer Andy Fickman has had huge success with family comedies, including such features as Race to Witch Mountain, The Game Plan and She’s The Man. His latest is the Disney comedy You Again is about a young woman named Marni (Kristen Bell) who returns home to Northern California for her brother’s wedding, only to find out that he is marrying Joanna (Odette Yustman), her high school arch nemesis. And, to make matters worse, Marni’s mother, Gail (Jamie Lee Curtis), realizes that she attended the same high school as Joanna’s aunt, Ramona (Sigourney Weaver), where they had their own rivalry some 30 years ago.

In this exclusive interview, Andy Fickman talked to Collider about working with his muse Kristen Bell, whom he’s known for nearly a decade, the importance of creating a family atmosphere on set, finding the right balance between comedy and drama, and how everyone can relate to not being able to fit in, in high school.

He also gave an update on his upcoming features Us and Them, starring Billy Crystal, and The Undomestic Goddess, based on the book by Sophie Kinsella, and shared his passion for Heathers: The Musical, which he is currently developing for the stage with the film’s screenwriter, Dan Waters. Check out what he had to say after the jump:

Andy Fickman’s agent has been busy over the last week.  On Friday, the director signed on for the Anna Faris-led comedy TMI.  Now, according to a tweet from Production Weekly, Fickman is attached to direct the horror comedy Boy Scouts vs. Zombies.  All we really have at this point is a title, but my what a title it is!

Zombies is a spec script from screenwriting duo Carrie Evans and Emi Mochizuki, whose only screen credit thus far is the 2008 Martin Lawrence vehicle College Road Trip.  No need to hold that against them.  A clever screenwriter (or better, a pair of them) should be able to milk plenty of sight gags from a group of innocents, always prepared, equipped with knives, fending off the walking dead.  We’ll see how it pans out.

Universal has hired director Andy Fickman (The Game Plan) to helm the comedy TMI, led by Anna Faris.  Written by Kirsten Smith (The House Bunny) and Marc Klein (Serendipity), the film tells the story of two best friends who “accidentally sleep together but soon find out they have “too much information” about each other to make it work.”  When we reported on the movie last year, it looked as if Ryan Reynolds would co-star in the movie with Faris, but Variety is now reporting that he will only be an executive producer on the film.

You can next see Faris in this December’s Yogi Bear.  The talented young comedienne also has a few projects lined up including:

• The Bachlorette Party, a “Hangover-style comedy” with Jennifer Garner
• a remake of Private Benjamin
• What’s Your Number?, which co-stars Chris Evans, Andy Samberg, Zachary Quinto, and Joel McHale
• the ensemble drama Ten Year.

Meanwhile, Fickman’s latest film, You Again, opens on September 24^th.

Fans of Billy Crystal and his comedy classic City Slickers have some news to be cheerful about. According to Deadline, Writers Lowell Gantz and Babaloo Mandel, who worked with Crystal on Slickers as well as Forget Paris and Father’s Day, with the actor again for upcoming film Us & Them. The film will be Crystal’s first lead role in nearly ten years, and is slated to be directed by Andy Fickman, of this Fall’s upcoming You Again. Crystal is also producing the film, which had been in development at Paramount for several years before being dropped. Fox picked it up in turnaround, and it is currently on fast-track as a co-production with Walden Media.

Crystal plays a grandfather charged with caring for his grandchildren for a week, who is confronted by the generational shift in parenting and the need to reconcile with his daughter. The plot seems like fertile ground for the kind of warm comedy Crystal does best, though Fickman’s family-friendly reputation seems likely to dull any edge it might have. As a huge fan of City Slickers, I’m hoping that Us & Them will have at least some of that film’s magic.

Walt Disney Pictures has just debuted the the trailer for You Again, the family-friendly comedy with an impressive cast led by Kristen Bell, Sigourney Weaver, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kristin Chenoweth, Odette Yustman, and Betty White.  Andy Fickman (Race to Witch Mountain) directs this tale of the successful Marni (Bell), who finds out that her brother’s fiancée is the same girl who tormented Marni throughout high school.  On top of that, the mother of the bride happens to have played the same role in the formative years of Marni’s mother (Jamie Lee Curtis) a generation earlier.  You can check out the trailer after the jump.

Many of the more recent film remakes have stayed pretty truthful to their original counterparts – 2009′s Race to Witch Mountain was the exception.  This film veered very far away from the original, and the similarities were very slight.  Though the film does offer some entertaining family fun and had some general similarities, fans of the original will most likely be left wanting more. My review after the jump: