Kendrick Lamar is making a movie with the creators ofSouth Park

The untitled comedy will center on a young Black man who works as a slave re-enactor at a living history museum.

By
Lester Fabian Brathwaite
Lester Fabian Brathwaite

Lester Fabian Brathwaite is a staff writer atEntertainment Weekly, where he covers breaking news, all thingsReal Housewives, and a rich cornucopia of popular culture. Formerly a senior editor atOut magazine, his work has appeared onNewNowNext,Queerty,Rolling Stone, andThe New Yorker. He was also the first author signed to Phoebe Robinson's Tiny Reparations imprint. He met Oprah once.

January 13, 2022 7:09 p.m. ET

Grammy and Pulitzer Prize-winning rapperKendrick Lamar is teaming up with Emmy and Tony-winning creative duoTrey Parker andMatt Stone (South Park,Book of Mormon) to produce a live-action film comedy — and wouldn't you know it would take that much hardware to make a topic as sensitive as slavery funny?

Paramount Pictures, Lamar's pgLang, and Parker and Stone's Park County announced Thursday that they're working on an untitled movie that 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."

The film is written by Vernon Chatham, and production is slated to begin in the spring.

Kendrick Lamar, Matt Stone and Trey Parker
Kendrick Lamar, and Matt Stone and Trey Parker.Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images; Sam Tabone/WireImage

Lamar's pgLang partner Dave Free is also on board as a producer. Paramount will handle theatrical distribution, home entertainment, and television licensing rights, and Paramount+ will have 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," Paramount president and CEO Brian Robbins said in a statement.

Lamar's most recent studio album was 2017'sDamn, though he also helped produced the 2018 soundtrack forBlack Panther and earned an Oscar nomination for its lead single, "All the Stars." Incidentally, Parker is a fellow Oscar nominee for Best Song, for "Blame Canada" fromSouth Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut.

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