Kendrick Lamar’s Best Year Ever to Hit New Heights With Comedy
Kendrick Lamar is having the best year ever and it’s only three months in. Five Grammy wins in one night. A Super Bowl halftime performance. A No. 1 album and three weeks with two songs at No. 1. Beating a Michael Jackson record and nearly matching another. The West Coast rapper will undoubtedly lock in more achievements before summer hits, but there’s one on the horizon that is unprecedented even for him: a new comedy movie.
This summer, K-Dot will see his creative talents play out on the big screen in a live-action comedy that he, pgLang cofounder Dave Free and South Park cocreators Trey Parker and Matt Stone are teaming up on. Yes, the guys that brought us Cartman and the “Kanye Likes Fishticks” episode are putting a movie together with arguably the biggest rapper on the planet right now. Kendrick and Free are producing the project via their company pgLang, while Parker and Stone will produce through their media and entertainment enterprise Park County. Word of the inner workings on the effort first emerged in 2022.
The movie, which doesn’t have a title revealed yet, centers on a young Black man who interns as a slave reenactor at a history museum. To his shock and surprise, he learns that his White girlfriend’s ancestor’s owned his ancestors. While K-Dot is a coproducer on the flick, there hasn’t been confirmation that he is also playing a role. Could the MC be the face of the film, too? According to Matt Stone, Kendrick is very involved in the picture as is Dave Free.
“We’re doing a movie with Kendrick, with Kendrick Lamar and Dave Free and their company, and we’re working on it and hopefully come out July 4 weekend opposite Jurassic Park, which is pretty funny,” Stone said last October during a talk with Bloomberg. He confirmed it will definitely be funny.
While that doesn’t answer the burning question of whether or not the Pulitzer Prize-winning artist gets the lead, there’s promise that the storytelling will be entertaining. Paramount Pictures CEO Brian Robbins ensured that the sparks will fly once the film debuts. “This script is one of the funniest and most original scripts we’ve ever read and it’s certain to create some fireworks,” he said at CinemaCon last April. Thank screenwriter and producer Vernon Chatman, who wrote the comedy, for that. Robbins confirmed production began last summer. The live-action comedy arrives July 4 and will be distributed by Paramount Pictures. Kendrick will be in Frankfurt, Germany on his Grand National Tour alongside SZA when the flick premieres.
Addressing the Black experience through his music, Kendrick Lamar is no stranger to tackling racism and oppression with his words. His critically acclaimed albums and galvanizing songs like “The Blacker the Berry,” released in 2015, come from thew view of a man who’s seen and been through a lot. There’s always a deeper meaning to his raps; this project will be no different. While laughs will surely be had being that this is his first comedy film, expect Kendrick to make sure there are some teachable moments with a plot surrounding the history of slaves.
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Hear more about Kendrick Lamar’s live-action comedy straight from co-producer Matt Stone below.