Wedding Crashers’ David Dobkin to direct Disney’s “trapped in a toy store” movie

By Sam Barsanti | January 6, 2017 | 2:15am

Aux Features Film

Disney has been fighting to make a movie about a kid who gets trapped in a toy store overnight since at least 2014, when Will Ferrell and his Gary Sanchez Productions company were developing the project with Hot Tub Time Machine director Steve Pink. By 2015, though, Pink and Ferrell were both off the film, which had been named Overnight At 42nd Street, and Napoleon Dynamite’s Jared Hess had stepped up to direct it instead. Now, nearly two years since then, Variety is reporting that Disney has brought in Wedding Crashers director David Dobkin to helm the project—which is now going by the simpler title Overnight.

Variety doesn’t say what happened to Hess, but it does have slightly more details about the plot. Apparently, it’s about “a father and son who win a contest to spend a night in a lavish toy store” and then have to fend off some burglars. The original pitch has always been “Home Alone in a toy store,” so they probably defeat the burglars with wacky traps and spiders, but Variety doesn’t specifically mention that.