‘21 Jump Street’ Female Spinoff Hires ‘Bob’s Burgers’ Writers for Competing Script

One of the more interesting spinoff projects is the upcoming female-centric 21 Jump Street movie, which recently hired Broad City writers Lucia Aniello and Paul W. Downs to pen a screenplay. But now Sony has hired another pair of writers to draft a competing screenplay: Lizzie and Wendy Molyneux, writers and producers of the hit FOX series Bob’s Burgers.

THR reports that Sony was quite taken with the Molyneux sisters’ pitch for the 21 Jump Street spinoff, so they hired the pair to write a screenplay — at the same time, Aniello and Downs are also delivering a screenplay for the spinoff, though it’s unclear if Sony intends to choose one over the other or blend the two scripts together somehow.

It’s a strange and sort of troubling trend that’s emerged in Hollywood recently. Most notably, Warner Bros has hired six different writers to pen six different screenplays for Wonder Woman, and the studio is reportedly taking the same approach with Aquaman. On the one hand, it speeds up the entire process — say Sony didn’t like the Aniello and Downs Jump Street script; rather than wait for another writer (or writers) to deliver a new screenplay, they’ll already have an alternate at the ready.

On the other hand, it encourages the studio to deconstruct each script and cherry pick the ideas and bits of dialogue they like best, creating a sort of Franken-script from all the pieces. That’s…not great.

It’s not too different from what’s been going on in the Hollywood system for decades: writers are brought in to rework screenplays and deliver additional drafts, and some of those writers ultimately end up uncredited for their work. Marvel takes a slightly similar approach, using in-house writers to polish and punch up screenplays, and those guys are also often uncredited.

But hey, the good news here is that two pairs of very talented, very funny people are working on screenplays for a lady-centric 21 Jump Street spinoff, and the end result should be really, really funny. Maybe. Hopefully.