Apocalypse Now: Rogen, Baruchel to Face World’s End Together

Seth Rogen, ready to take over the world with his powers of comedy and this small, evil doll. 

What if you and your best friend were the last people left on earth? Would you stay friends? Or would a few weeks of each other’s company leave you ready to surrender to the zombies, rampaging animals or massive doses of radiation that lay outside your door?

That’s pretty much the premise of Jay and Seth vs. the Apocalypse. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Mandate Pictures is turning the trailer for the not-yet-made film that hit Youtube last year into a feature film. Evan Goldberg, Seth Rogen’s writing partner, and Jason Stone came up with the idea. Rogen and Jay Baruchel starred in the trailer and Stone directed. Rogen and Goldberg will write the script for the feature, with the two stars in place (otherwise, they’d have to find two other guys named Seth and Jay. Could be awkward). A director will be found as soon as possible and shooting will hopefully begin in 2009.

Rogen’s a busy guy–he’s currently shooting a  Judd Apatow comedy with Adam Sandler and since that will probably clock in at about 3 1/2 hours, who know how long they’ll be filming? Then Rogen and Goldberg are writing The Green Hornet which is set to shoot early in 2009 for a 2010 release date. But no one’s worried about him and Goldberg overextending themselves–in fact, Mandate is so confident in the pair that they’re giving them final cut (hint: bring it in under a 100 minutes. I’m just suggesting.).

Here’s the Youtube trailer:

It’s a cute trailer…but is it a whole movie? I’m always suspicious of things that seem like great ideas as sketches, or trailers, or tag lines that people then try to extend into whole movies. You need more than one joke to be a feature film and sometimes an idea that seems so ingenious and clever on its own isn’t meant to carry the weight of a whole story. So it will be interesting, if nothing else, to see whether this is another one of those “hey…you know what would be really funny? If I had two heads and they didn’t like each other?” type of things that are busts as films or whether they can pull off a real story here.