Chris Columbus To Direct 'The Secret Life Of Road Crews'?

In the past year, Chris Columbus has become attached to a couple different films as producer and possible director (Hello Ghost, Percy Jackson 2 ) and now he's got one more. He's in talks to direct The Secret Lives of Road Crews, which sounds like the title of a drenched-in-irony memoir, but is really a comedic action script by Kevin Lund and T.J. Scott that involves subterranean monsters and the men assembled to combat them.

Deadline says the film would be about "a clandestine group of road crew workers who are the last line of defense against a subterranean alien race."

So it's sort of a companion piece to Neighborhood Watch? Sounds that way. The script has been kicking around as a spec for a couple years, and ended up at Paramount after the Dreamworks/Paramount split. It's still at the studio, which put Craig Mazin on rewrite duties some time ago. That version ended up in the hands of Chris Columbus.

Now you're up to speed with the basic identity and history of the project; the question will be whether it actually happens. This sort of project, a basically original property with a comedy/action blend, is the sort of thing that can get tied up in endless rewrites as producers and director try to get the tone just right in the hopes of creating the next Men in Black. Indeed, Deadline says Paramount is soliciting a new rewrite now. Call the odds of this getting made anytime soon to be somewhere in the realm of... of, let's say 20:1 just to be generous.