| Italic Title: | no |
| Director: | Trey Parker |
| Distributor: | Paramount Pictures |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
Trey Parker is directing an upcoming American comedy film from a screenplay by Vernon Chatman. It is co-produced by Parker and longtime creative collaborator Matt Stone through Park County, along with Kendrick Lamar and Dave Free through PGLang. Filming began in October 2024.
The film is set to be released theatrically by Paramount Pictures on July 4, 2025.
The film will depict the past and present coming to a head, when a young Black man who is interning as a slave reenactor at a living history museum discovers that his white girlfriend's ancestors once owned his.[1]
Trey Parker and Matt Stone have worked with Vernon Chatman on their animated sitcom South Park since 2001. In addition to serving as a producer and writing consultant for the series, Chatman has voiced the anthropomorphic recurring character Towelie since the character's titular episodic debut.[2]
The untitled film will mark the first theatrical collaboration, and second overall, between Parker, Stone, Kendrick Lamar, and Dave Free. Parker and Stone developed the deepfakes used in the music video for Lamar's promotional single "The Heart Part 5" (2022) through their artificial intelligence startup studio Deep Voodoo.[3] The film will also mark the first feature film to be produced through PGLang, Lamar and Free's creative company, and Park County, Parker and Stone's re-named production company.[4]
The untitled live action film was announced by Deadline Hollywood on January 13, 2022. Chatman penned the screenplay, which Brian Robbins, president and chief executive officer of Paramount Pictures, called "one of the funniest and original scripts" he has ever read.[5] When news broke of the film's development, a director was not yet attached. By March 2023, Parker had reportedly signed on to direct the film.[6] [7]
Principal photography was initially scheduled to commence in the spring of 2022, but was pushed back due to Parker and Stone's prior commitments to South Park. During Paramount's CinemaCon presentation on April 11, 2024, the company confirmed that production was set to begin during the summer. Filming ultimately began in October in Pomona, California.[8]
Paramount Pictures will handle the film's theatrical distribution, home entertainment, and television licensing rights, with Paramount+ acquiring streaming rights. In an accompanying statement, Robbins wrote that the film studio and the wider ViacomCBS family were "look[ing] forward to ushering in the first theatrical collaboration from these creative visionaries, and galvanizing audiences worldwide around a powerful storytelling experience." The untitled film is scheduled to be released in theaters on July 4, 2025, in a nod to American Independence Day.[9]