Kendrick Lamar, Dave Free, ‘South Park’ Creators To Produce New Live-Action Comedy Film

Rapper Kendrick Lamar, producer/record executive Dave Free, and South Park co-creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone will join forces to produce a new live-action film for Paramount Pictures, Deadline reports. The comedy reportedly follows a young Black man interning as a “slave reenactor at a living history museum” who finds out that his white girlfriend’s ancestors owned his.

The as yet untitled film was written by Vernon Chatman, the four-time Emmy and Peabody award-winning writer, director, and voice actor. In addition to creating Adult Swim’s The Shivering Truth and co-creating cult favorite series like Wonder Showzen, Xavier: Renegade Angel, Trigger Warning With Killer Mike, and Doggie Fizzle Televizzle With Snoop Dogg, Chatman has served as a writer-producer on South Park for 20 seasons. Fans of the long-running Comedy Central series may also recognize him as the voice of the show’s pot-smoking towel, Towelie.

“On behalf of Paramount Pictures and the wider ViacomCBS family, we look forward to ushering in the first theatrical collaboration from these creative visionaries, and galvanizing audiences worldwide around a powerful storytelling experience,” said Paramount Pictures’ president and CEO, Brian Robbins in a statement to Deadline.

Longtime friends and collaborators Kendrick Lamar and Dave Free will produce on behalf of pgLang, the media company they co-founded in 2020 following Free’s 2019 departure from his role as co-president of Top Dawg Entertainment. The film will mark pgLang’s first foray into film production.

Lamar, who has been signed to Top Dawg for his entire career, announced in 2021 that he was in the process of making his “final TDE album,” though details about his first LP since 2017’s DAMN have been few and far between.

While Kendrick Lamar has remained largely off-the-grid—his low-fi August 2021 update noted that he goes “months without a phone”—he is scheduled to perform as part of an L.A.-centric Super Bowl LVI Halftime Show on February 13th alongside Dr. Dre, Mary J. Blige, and Snoop Dogg.

[H/T Deadline]