Rarely has there been a Hollywood comedy with odder roots than 2009’s He’s Just Not That Into You, but the creative team who brought filmgoers the self-help book-based rom-com is planning a big-screen adaptation of the fiercely dated 1970s sitcom Three’s Company, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Warner Bros offshoot New Line has hired He’s Just Not That Into You’s screenwriters, Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein, to oversee the movie. The TV series, which starred John Ritter and ran in the US on the ABC network between 1977 and 1984, does not immediately appear to fit the 21st-century zeitgeist. It’s not-so-racy premise centred on a young man who moves in to flat share with two women and is forced to pretend he is gay in order to avoid censure by a conservative landlord. The studio is planning to set the film adaptation in the 1970s in order to sustain the setup.
The original Three’s Company was based on a British comedy, Man About the House, which ran for four years on ITV from 1973, starring Richard O’Sullivan, Paula Wilcox and Sally Thomsett.
Hollywood has previously adapted other TV shows from the era for the big screen, such as The Brady Bunch, Starsky & Hutch and The Dukes of Hazzard, with varying results. More recently, studios have tended towards mining the 1990s for material: there have been two successful comedies based on teen cop show 21 Jump Street, as well as a film riffing off lifeguard drama Baywatch due out next year.
