Greenlight the Chris Farley Movie Already

The good news about a Chris Farley biopic kept coming — for a while. In April 2024, The Hollywood Reporter told us that Paul Walter Hauser had signed on to star in a movie based on The Chris Farley Story: A Biography in Three Acts, the book by Chris’s brother, Tom. New Line Cinema won the bidding to produce the film, with comic actor Josh Gad making his directorial debut. Saturday Night Live’s Lorne Michaels was on board as a producer. The writers who adapted The Disaster Artist were working on a script. It was all coming together, comedy nerds!

All went silent for a year, however. Was the movie off? No way, said Gad, who provided an optimistic update in September of this year about his “ambitious as hell” movie. “We're trying to rein in the budget a little,” Gad told Entertainment Weekly, but “the plan is still to shoot early next year."

“I'm in the midst of going through the script right now with the studio, who's been incredibly supportive about finding those things that can reduce it to a greenlight-able budget because, right now, it's a period piece, it's a biopic, it's just super big, and we're just working towards doing this to it, and I think we're getting there,” Gad said.

But will the movie, now titled A Chris Farley Story, actually get there? You won’t find much on IMDb unless you have a pro subscription, since the movie is still considered “in development.” A peek at the Pro version doesn’t provide much more than you’ll find in the paragraphs above — Gad, Hauser and Michaels are attached, but otherwise, not much is happening. 

Did Saturday Night hurt its chances? Jason Reitman’s 2024 movie about the first-ever episode of SNL was nominated for a handful of minor awards, but the modest acclaim didn’t translate into box-office success. Variety included Saturday Night in its story about “Some of the Biggest Flops of the Year,” noting that it made only $10 million against its $30 million budget. Maybe that’s why New Line is skittish about A Chris Farley Story’s road to profit. 

But the studio should know the clock is ticking. It can't afford to lose the in-demand Hauser, the perfect guy to play Farley. Heck, he’s even got Farley’s name tattooed on his right arm alongside his other comedy heroes. 

He’s already put in some serious work, picking the brains of Michaels, Tim Meadows and David Spade about the Tommy Boy star. “They've all been super gracious and cool about it,” Hauser told Entertainment Weekly. “It's a difficult subject to talk about because everyone feels horrible about how it went and how it ended, but there's also great glimmers of fond remembrance and humor as they retell some of the funniest stories about Chris.”

The problem is that Hauser is already 38, five years older than Farley when he died. The longer the movie sits in development limbo, the less believable Hauser becomes in the role. “I don't wanna be 42 years old playing Chris at 25,” he said.

New Line and Josh Gad, do what you have to do. Cut a few bucks here or there. Don’t give Rob Schneider the cameo you promised him. But holy schnikes, fellas, greenlight the Chris Farley movie already.