Eugenio Derbez’s biggest U.S. hit is getting a remake…
Lionsgate is planning an English-language remake of the 56-year-old Mexican actor’s Spanish-language hit Instructions Not Included.
In Instructions Not Included, the life of a playboy jazz musician is upended when a former flame leaves their baby girl for him to raise alone. He smuggles himself and the kid across the border to find her in Los Angeles. Ten floors up, he sees the girl wander into a pool and plunges 10 floors to save her. He promptly gets a stuntman job and raises the young girl. Six years later, the birth mother returns and wants to be part of her daughter’s life.
Set to direct is Amanda Lipitz, the Tony-winning producer whose first directing effort, Step, won a prize at the last Sundance Film Festival for Inspirational Filmmaking and sold for $4 million in a bidding battle to Fox Searchlight.
Lipitz is producing with Scott Rudin a narrative version of that film for Searchlight.
The Derbez-directed original was a massive hit in the U.S. Back home in Mexico, it was 2013’s highest-grossing film after Despicable Me 2 and Iron Man 3.
John Sacchi is producing the remake. Script is by Rob Lieber.
The film has been remade in France and Turkey.
