ComingSoon has announced that Johnny Depp has been confirmed for a cameo in the upcoming film adaptation of the ’80s TV show 21 Jump Street, in which Depp was one of the principals for four of the show’s five seasons. He’s since gone on to have a modestly successful career in movies, starring in one or two films that you might have seen over the years.
The adaptation for the big screen is to be directed by Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs duo, Phil Lord and Chris Miller, and will be starring Jonah Hill (who has been involved with the project since May 2008, and will also be executive producing), Channing Tatum (who’ll be taking Depp’s original role), Dave Franco, Ice Cube, and Brie Larson in the lead female role.
The film be following in the same footsteps as the original show, about a group of young cops who go undercover in schools, with Cube playing the youngster’s police chief. Hill, who’s also a co-writer on the project, said back in May ’09 that the studio told him,
“they were gonna let me make my kind of movie—an R-rated, insane, Bad-Boys-meets-John Hughes-type movie.”
Whilst the original TV show was a little before my time, I do quite like the sound of that. John Hughes was a prodigious filmmaker (we’ll remember him always), and plenty of Bad Boys-esque action sequences to mix things up can’t go amiss. I think Hill’s had a lot of great roles in the past few years, and he does seem like a genuinely funny person, so I think this adaptation could definitely prove to be a big success. It’s set to be released in the UK on 20th April next year, so we have one year almost to the day to look forward to it.
