Ready or not, here comes another dose of Basketball Wives. The reality show about the lives of a group of women who have all been somehow romantically linked to professional basketball players is reportedly getting the big screen treatment. The show’s creator and executive producer Shaune O’Neal has teamed up with Tracey Edmonds (who produced Jumping the Broom), to create a movie about a fictional girlfriend turned basketball wife.
According to Variety, Edmonds and O’Neal have sold the movie pitch to Fox Searchlight and it will be written by Elizabeth Hunter, the co-writer of Jumping the Broom. The project is said to be loosely inspired by the lives of O’Neal and some her friends.
The film “centers around a young woman who follows her boyfriend to Miami after he gets drafted into the NBA. Thrust into the world of professional sports, she meets the other players’ wives and learns from their trials and tribulations.”
“The beauty of a feature film is that we’ll have the ability to dig much deeper into the stories and characters that come from this very colorful world and create a very juicy, action-packed narrative,” Edmonds told Variety. She also mentioned that O’Neal originally reached out to her about the project via Twitter.
No word yet as to whether any of the current cast of Basketball Wives will be featured in the Fox Searchlight project. But it would not be surprising to see some of the ladies making appearances on the big screen.
This is not the first time that a reality show has been able to take its TV brand to movie theaters, but it’s the first time that a black reality show has been given the Hollywood treatment.
The reality series Jackass, which aired on MTV from 2000 to 2002, and featured people performing crude and often dangerous stunts and pranks, had a successful run on TV, but made an even bigger splash in movie theaters. Since 2002, three Jackass films have been produced and released by MTV’s sibling company Paramount Pictures, making the franchise a worldwide success.
2002’s Jackass: The Movie, reportedly made on a $5 million budget, raked in $64 million at the box office. Jackass Number Two did even better and had a domestic gross of $72 million when it was released in theaters in 2006. And 2010’s Jackass 3-D brought in an astounding $117 million.
Maybe Shaunie O’Neal is being progressive with her Basketball Wives brand, and hopes to pocket a hefty box office return comparable to the Jackass franchise. Or maybe she wants to give America an even bigger dose of the slap-happy, lawsuit filled, table-jumping, name-calling world that makes up Basketball Wives.
Follow Chris Witherspoon on Twitter at @WitherspoonC