I loved Shane Black’s The Nice Guys, but it wasn’t a hit at the box office. It only grossed $62 million worldwide off a budget of $50 million, so even though it would be great to see a follow-up film following Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe) and Holland March (Ryan Gosling) with Black returning to write and direct, that’s not going to happen. However, producer Joel Silver thinks there’s still life left in the premise (or at least the property), and is positioning it for a female-led reboot.

Deadline reports that “Fox has given a script commitment plus penalty to The Nice Girls, a contemporary female take on” Black’s 2016 movie. Black won’t be involved, nor will Crowe or Gosling. Michael Diliberti, who wrote 30 Minutes or Less, will pen the script, but there are no details on what the story might entail. Presumably, it will follow two female detectives who solve crimes in L.A., but who knows? At this point, the reboot seems to have so little in common with Black’s movie that you wonder why Silver is even using it as a springboard. I have nothing against a female-led reboot, but why not set it in the 70s? Additionally, there’s no recapturing Black’s crackerjack tone and subversion, so essentially you’re trying to sell a show based on a movie that no one saw.

It remains to be seen if this even gets picked up. It’s possible that Fox likes what they have with their Lethal Weapon adaptation, and they’re looking for something to compliment that series, a show that was adapted from a movie and the first movie was penned by Black. That’s not to say that the Lethal Weapon TV show is any good, but at least that might give us some insight into why Fox and Silver would want to reboot The Nice Guys.

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Image via Warner Bros.
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Image via Warner Bros.
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Image via Warner Bros.