Hardy-Har-Har

Hot off of their recent mega-hit Night At The Museum, Ben Stiller and director Shawn Levy, are set to re-team for another project. This time though Stiller's co-stars will not be primarily limited to a bunch of CGI enhanced characters. Indeed, Tom Cruise will be along for the ride, helping to bring a pair of famous teen detectives into adulthood...

Nicole LaPorte and Michael Fleming of Variety:

Twentieth Century Fox has set...Stiller and... Cruise to play sleuths in "The Hardy Men," a Shawn Levy-directed action comedy based on mystery series "The Hardy Boys."

At the same time, Stiller and Cruise have been actively discussing a potential team-up in "Tropic Thunder," the pic Stiller will direct next for DreamWorks. Such an alliance would be ironic, given that the film would be distributed by Paramount, the studio that unceremoniously severed its long-term deal with Cruise after Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone publicly rebuked the star.

Cruise and Stiller have been friends for years -- an alliance that grew out of Cruise’s admiration for Stiller’s penchant for doing Cruise impersonations. That started on "The Ben Stiller Show" and was executed most memorably in the 2000 Joel Gallen-directed short "Mission: Improbable," in which Stiller portrayed a stuntman for Cruise on "Mission: Impossible 2." Cruise played himself in the spoof.

While "Tropic Thunder" is in the talking stage, Cruise and Stiller are further along on "The Hardy Men," which Fox hopes to put into production by 2008...

Stiller began batting ideas around recently with Levy and Cruise, and they’ve come up with an ambitious premise that will be executed in the spirit of "Mr. & Mrs. Smith."

The plot: The Hardy boys, once wunderkind youth sleuths, have grown up. Long estranged, they’re brought together to solve one last case.

Fox is hunting for a scribe to do a rewrite.

Stiller is producing "The Hardy Men" with his Red Hour partner Stuart Cornfeld, along with Robert Kosberg. Kosberg owned the original "Hardy Boys" rights and brought the project to Red Hour eight years ago.

Since then, the project has languished in development hell through regime changes at Fox and numerous rewrites. (Michael Sargent penned the original script.) Project was originally set up at Fox 2000 but now will be produced at 20th Century Fox...

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I never really got into the Hardy Boys books all that much growing up. I think I may have glanced at one or two of them in grade school...

What I really remember of them comes from having watched segments of "The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries" television series in the 70's...

The Hardy Boys TV Series Cast Photo

For the the film version of Boys to work-The script has to be better than your average retro-comedy spoof--along the order of The Brady Bunch Movie (1995) which was very well done as opposed to the 2004 comedy version of Starsky & Hutch....which also starred Stiller. Fingers Crossed...