Is MAD magazine still around? Those poor kids today if not, MAD was an awesome parody/comedy magazine that was just on the line of naughty to make it cool and introduced generations of kids to the humor that would define comedy in the 90s. Think of movies like Billy Madison…you don’t get that without MAD. I went on a bit of a tangent there, but I’m making my way around to the point. The most well-known regular feature in MAD was Spy Vs Spy where two spies, one white, one black, would run around trying to catch each other often to hilarious results. For some reason Spy Vs Spy has been banded around for a film/show for years and it’s finally starting to happen. According to Collider, Rawsom Marshall Thurber is on-board to direct the live-action take on the classic comic, and I’m not sure how to feel about that. Thurber has chops, don’t get me wrong. He’s become a frequent collaborator with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson which really seems to fit the espionage and action elements but the humor in his films like, Skyscraper and Central Intelligence is far from subtle and intelligent which seems like the hallmark of MAD magazine….yes it’s blunt and slapstick on the surface but there were always layers to what they did.
No word on a release timeline as Thurber was in the middle of shooting a new film Red Notice with Gal Gadot (lucky bastard) when COVID-19 hit, so like most of Hollywood he’ll have some catching up to do when this crisis subsides.
