jinx

A piece of trivia on this #ThrowbackThursday…

Did you know that, in 2003, Halle Berry entered a deal with MGM studios to star in and produce a remake of “Foxy Brown” (the 1974 Blaxploitation flick that helped put Pam Grier on the map)?

Look, I genuinely like Halle, but no one can replace Pam Grier, and especially Ms. Grier in one of her signature roles (The other being in “Coffy” of course). And like 99% of most remakes, it probably would’ve sucked.

The project, thankfully, never got off the ground, and no reason was ever given. But I would like to think that someone at MGM woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat and said “What the hell are we doing?” and pulled the plug on it.

But there’s another high profile, and more suitable project with Halle that did get closer to being made and that, maybe, might have actually worked, but didn’t get off the ground either. I’m talking about that James Bond “Die Another Day” spinoff movie that would’ve starred the character Halle played in it – Jinx. And for a while, it looked like it would happen.

Back in 2003, after the Bond film became a worldwide hit, the producers started work on a Jinx Johnson film to be toplined by Berry, in her own film. A script was even written by Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, who penned every Bond film after “The World is Not Enough,” and it appeared progress was being made on the project.

However, there was a sudden change of heart on the studio’s part when, in 2004, MGM stopped development and ordered the screenwriters to immediately end any further rewrites on the “Jinx” movie script, and instead to concentrate on writing the next Bond film, which eventually became “Casino Royale.”

At the time, the studio claimed “creative differences” as the reason for the “Jinx” halt. But I suspect that was just a polite way of saying, “We just saw the Catwoman movie that Halle Berry starred in, and decided to cancel the Jinx film ASAP.” The awful Catwoman film was released in 2004, before the decision to pull the plug on the Jinx movie.

But back to “Foxy Brown”…

In case you’re not aware, Meagan Good is making another attempt at a TV series – one that’s also based on a movie, following last year’s “Minority Report” at Fox, which unfortunately was axed by the network after its first season. This time around, Good and MGM are bringing “Foxy Brown” to the small screen as a series that’s set up at Hulu, and will be executive produced by DeVon Franklin and Tony Krantz. Described as a modern-day reimagining of the blaxploitation classic, the series is being scripted by Malcolm Spellman and Ben Watkins, who will also showrun, with Good also serving as a producer of what has been a passion project for her.

We haven’t heard anything on the project’s progress since it was first announced in December of 2016. And since Halle Berry’s “Jinx” spin-off was nixed, there hasn’t been any news on it either because it’s dead. But you never know in the current climate we’re in as everything old is new again.