I was reading an interview with Kevin Smith over at Entertainment Weekly on how his buddy cop feature starring Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan at Warner Bros. went from the working title of A Couple of Dicks to Cop Out, and the short story is rather obvious and boring, but their attempt to get it worked out is a bit interesting. Before watching the trailer, here’s a snippet:
Warner Bros. decided, “Hey man, we’ll call the networks and see if we’re going to get any problems, months before the movie’s ever going to come out.” The top 3 networks — CBS, ABC, NBC — said we can’t run one of your spots before 9 o’clock.
I’m like, “Well what about Inglourious Basterds?” And I guess, because of the spelling, they got away with it. So we were like, “Can we call it A Couple of D.I.C.s?” Because that’s the proper acronym for detectives, Detective In Charge. And [the networks] kicked that back as well. It was the pluralizing of any form of dick, whether it was d-i-c-k or any derivation.
So my feeling was like, it’s an R-rated movie, so who the f– are we talking to anyway before 9 o’clock? Warner Bros’s feeling was like, “Hey man, the sports audience, dickhead. We have to advertise to the sports audience on Saturday and Sunday and all those sporting events usually take place before 9 p.m. in the evening.” At which point, I was like, “Oh wow, you guys are way smarter than me.”
Smith obviously mentions the problems he had with Zack and Miri Make a Porno and how some TV spots were cut down to simply Zack and Miri or it had to be marketed after 9 PM, neither solution really being all that preferable. However, when it comes down to it I think Cop Out is a pretty great name considering the circumstances.
That said, here’s the trailer, which you can also watch in high definition at Apple.com.
Cop Out hits theaters on February 26, 2010 and tells the story of two longtime NYPD partners on the trail of a stolen, rare, mint-condition baseball card find themselves up against a merciless, memorabilia-obsessed gangster. Jimmy (Willis) is the veteran detective whose missing collectible is his only hope to pay for his daughter’s upcoming wedding, and Paul (Morgan) is his “partner-against-crime” whose preoccupation with his wife’s alleged infidelity makes it hard for him to keep his eye on the ball. Seann William Scott, Adam Brody, Kevin Pollak, Ana de la Reguera, Jason Lee and Michelle Trachtenberg also star.
You can check out the first still from the film right here.
