How many people — and how many years of planning — does it take to throw a successful office Christmas party? Apparently, if you’re DreamWorks, it takes more than four writers and approximately six years. But that’s okay. Because it looks like the party is going to be an absolute banger: Jennifer Aniston, Jason Bateman, Kate McKinnon, and T.J. Miller have all joined the cast of the studio’s long-gestating comedy Office Christmas Party.
The film will follow an “office Christmas party that gets out of hand,” which is to say, it follows your standard office Christmas party. Someone will get too drunk. Someone will hit on someone inappropriately. Someone will topple down a flight of stairs and bleed so profusely from a minor head wound that they’re rushed to the hospital, still too drunk. (Just my office Christmas parties, or…?) And just like all office parties do, the film will “face a tight turnaround,” as it’ll start production in Atlanta in the spring and be released by December 9.
Though, again, Office Christmas Party has really been in development for years and years. Will Speck and Josh Gordon (of Blades of Glory and The Switch, which also starred Aniston and Bateman) first pitched it back in 2010, though producer Guymon Casady gets credit over at The Wrap for the “original idea for a workplace comedy.” Yet the two original writers are still signed on to direct. Okay! Sure. Anyway, since then, explains The Wrap, “numerous writers have tried to crack it,” including Pixels‘ Tim Dowling, and, most recently, Laura Solon and the writing duo of Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky.
The stars have aligned and realigned over the years as well, explains The Hollywood Reporter, though it doesn’t name specific names. This type of runaround nonsense doesn’t usually bode suuuper well for a film, but honestly, a movie in which Jennifer Aniston, Jason Bateman, T.J. Miller, and Kate McKinnon get f*cked up and make horrible decisions within a corporate environment would be particularly difficult to ruin.
