Boots Riley’s long-awaited cinematic follow-up to Sorry to Bother You is on the way. Over the weekend, The New York Times‘ Kyle Buchanan took to Twitter to confirm some of the first details surrounding Riley’s next film. The currently-untitled project is being distributed by NEON, and is expected to begin production this spring. No casting details are currently known at this time. Riley’s new film reportedly centers around “a ring of female shoplifters” — which, given how easily 2018’s Sorry to Bother You was initially sold as a movie “about telemarketing”, could easily spiral into a wild larger concept.
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“Just chatted with Boots Riley at a pre-Globes Vanity Fair party and got a fun scoop about his next film: It’s about a ring of female shoplifters, it shoots in the spring, and Neon will distribute,” Buchanan wrote.
What Is Boots Riley’s Television Show?
Last year, Riley co-created the Prime Video series I’m a Virgo, which quickly became an unexpected part of 2023’s television landscape. The series is a darkly comedic fantastical coming-of-age joyride about Cootie (Jharrel Jerome), a 13-foot-tall young Black man in Oakland, CA. Having grown up hidden away, passing time on a diet of comic books and TV shows, he escapes to experience the beauty and contradictions of the real world. He forms friendships, finds love, navigates awkward situations, and encounters his idol, the real life superhero named The Hero (Walton Goggins). The series also stars Brett Gray, Kara Young, Allius Barnes, Olivia Washington, Mike Epps, and Carmen Ejogo.
“I don’t want to give people a sense of what to expect. That’s my whole thing,” Riley told IndieWire in a 2020 interview. “What I’ll say about it is it’s about a 13-foot tall Black man who lives in Oakland. It deals with a group of kids at an age that, because they’re Black, they’re not allowed to be kids. They’re not allowed to come of age. It’s about the way the world sees him, as opposed to how he sees himself.”
“For me, it’s really experiential,” Riley continued. “How do I keep you interested and wanting to keep watching, and how do I get you do feel something? I don’t want you to keep watching because I have done this easy, manipulative thing that makes you have to press ‘watch the next one’ again. I hate stories that don’t end… I’m not saying how many seasons it will be, but there’s a story that ends.”
Would Boots Riley Direct a Superhero Movie?
Although some have wanted to see Riley take his talents to some sort of existing property, he has been vocal about his feelings around the recent influx of superhero movies. As Riley argued in a 2019 interview with IndieWire, the stories of those films largely boil down to the same message regarding authority.
“Excellent performances and you know, I love Joaquin Phoenix and hope to work with him,” Riley said of DC’s 2019 film Joker. “But basically it wasn’t flipping the superhero story on its head; it was doing the same exact thing that they all do, which is ‘rebellion is crazy.’ That’s what they told you, that these people are rebelling and they have no real reason to.”
“That’s the same thing that The Dark Knight tried to tell us. You know, The Dark Knight, they made it more like Occupy after Occupy happened because they wanted to make this statement,” Riley argued. “The truth is that these superhero movies are cop movies, and cop stories, cop shows, and cop movies are all about saying one thing — that those in poverty are there because they made the wrong choices, that the impoverished are in poverty because of their own mistakes and their own shortcomings, and it has nothing to do with the system.”
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