Reunion Director Explains How the Murder Mystery Comedy Has Been 10 Years in the Making

Over the course of his career, Chris Nelson has directed many films, including My Dead Ex and Netflix’s The Perfect Date but now he’s dipping his toes into the mystery genre with murder mystery comedy, Reunion. The film centers around a group of unlikely individuals that attend their high school reunion in the middle of a snow storm only to be caught up in a web of mystery when one of their classmates dies. They come to the conclusion that the person who did it is still among them. 

Reunion is encompassed by an all-star cast of Chace Crawford (The Boys), Nina Dobrev (The Vampire Diaries), Lil Rel Howery (Vacation Friends, Get Out), Billy Magnussen (Road House, No Time To Die), Jamie Chung (ABC’s Once Upon A Time, Grown Ups), Jillian Bell (Good Burger 2, 22 Jump Street) and Michael Hitchcock (Bridesmaids).

Whodunnits have regained popularity over the last several years with projects like Knives Out, See How They Run and Apple TV+’s The Afterparty. However, Reunion has been in the works longer than all of the aforementioned projects, so there wasn’t a ton of modern material to pull from. Nelson told Comicbook in an interview that he mainly pulled from R-rated comedies as well as the iconic detective novel author Agatha Christie.

“I got the script before Knives Out was even out so there was nothing really to pull off of in my mind other than Clue obviously from ways back in terms of murder-comedy. For me, the Agatha Christie thing, for sure. And I know what you’re saying about the theatrical kind of component and in some ways when you’re doing something that’s closed room with only six characters in that sort of Agatha Christie style or like Clue, there is a theatrical component to it because you’re really working with six characters in a closed room set. And there is something about that I personally kind of thought was fun to lean into,” Nelson told Comicbook.

“But I first and foremost really saw this as a reunion comedy so for me that’s partially what was so exciting is there’s not a lot of reunion comedies that you can think of. So I was like, ‘the characters of a reunion going back to high school and having your past self kind of come out, what are you hiding and your secrets?’ That, to me, was the juice of it. So I was watching and talking about a lot of classic just ensemble R-rated comedies that were really fun, like Bridesmaids and The Breakfast Club. Ideas of ‘how do you create really interesting characters that have their own quirks and personalities that are coming together in a situation?’ That was the thing that I felt like was the most exciting blueprint. And there is kind of like this weird Breakfast Club element to the fact that you have all of these characters that would normally never hang out together, they’re suddenly stuck in this house with this really bad hangover after their reunion, and they just are forced to have to deal with each other. And that to me, was the real magic of the movie.”

While working with the writers on the film, Nelson revealed that the script had actually been in active development for 10 years from writers Willie Block and Jake Emanuel. “Well, William and Jake, I will say they’re complete Agatha Christie fans, and so does. And as I said, they wrote this script 10 years ago. This script for them, they started working on it way before Knives Out, way before this wave which is amazing how there is kind of this creative zeitgeist of things that happen and people kind of veer into at the same time. But they really came at it from a very classic Agatha Christie closed room whodunnit standpoint. They obviously had written in the characters and the comedy and all that as well, but we then really kind of came in and shaped it along with the actors to be like, ‘okay, we wanna make this very much a reunion comedy as well, first and foremost.’ And so we really worked on that all the way up until the shooting, and then did so much improv and so much play within that as well, to kind of keep that sort of life to it, and keep the reunion comedy alive throughout the whodunnit.”

Reunion releases on Digital June 28th.