Kendrick Lamar and Dave Free are teaming up with South Park co-creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker to produce a comedy film for Paramount Pictures.
The yet-untitled, live-action comedy, written by Vernon Chatman, will “depict the past and present coming to a head when a young Black man, who is interning as a slave re-enactor at a living history museum, discovers that his white girlfriend’s ancestors once owned his,” according to a press statement.
The movie marks the first feature produced under Lamar and Free’s pgLang company, which they announced in 2020. They launched pgLang as a multilingual, artist-friendly service company that’s a record label, movie studio and publishing house combined. Lamar’s younger cousin and rapper Baby Keem became the first artist signed to the pgLang label service. Stone and Parker will be producing for their Park County banner.
Production is slated to kick off this spring. A director has not yet been attached to the film. Paramount Pictures will be responsible for theatrical distribution, home entertainment and television licensing rights on the project, and Paramount Plus will acquire the streaming rights.
“On behalf of Paramount Pictures and the wider ViacomCBS family, we look forward to ushering in the first theatrical collaboration from these creative visionaries, and galvanizing audiences worldwide around a powerful storytelling experience,” said Paramount Pictures president and CEO Brian Robbins in a statement.
The 13-time Grammy-winning MC announced this past summer that he will be leaving his longtime label Top Dawg Entertainment after 17 years and that he was working on his “final TDE album.” His last solo album, the critically acclaimed DAMN from 2017, topped the Billboard 200 with 603,000 album-equivalent units in the opening week. It also earned him the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Music. He curated Black Panther: The Album in 2018, which nabbed eight nominations at the Grammy Awards the following year, including best rap performance winner “King’s Dead.” Lamar gave a career-spanning live performance, his first in over two years, at the 2021 Day N Vegas music festival.
