Judd Apa­tow will attempt to find the fun­ny in COVID with his new film

It was only a mat­ter of time until we got the first film attempt­ing to mine some laughs from the banal hor­ror of the past twelve months, and it looks like Judd Apa­tow has appoint­ed him­self the man to do it. Yes­ter­day brought news of the Juddernaut’s next film, through which he’ll try to find the fun­ny in the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic and Hollywood’s place in it. (Or lack thereof.)

Dead­line reports that Apa­tow has been locked in to direct, pro­duce, and co-write The Bub­ble, a satir­i­cal black com­e­dy with a top­i­cal hook. And with plans to shoot as ear­ly as pos­si­ble this year, the release on Net­flix could very well come before 2021 is up.

The film focus­es on a movie crew trapped in a hotel quar­an­tine while they strug­gle to com­plete their pro­duc­tion, a premise that I’m sure bears only coin­ci­den­tal resem­blance to Rain­er Wern­er Fassbinder’s clas­sic claus­tro-dra­ma Beware of a Holy Whore. In this instance, the men­tal stres­sors of social dis­tanc­ing and per­son­al pro­tec­tive equip­ment will col­lide with the nat­ur­al self-absorp­tion of the actor pathol­o­gy, strand­ing them in a world where they can­not main­tain their sense of impor­tance or the public’s attention.

Apa­tow has round­ed up a wor­thy ensem­ble to make his most time­ly, issue-dri­ven film yet (this all sounds like some­thing Adam McK­ay would do), includ­ing Karen Gillan, Kee­gan-Michael Key, Fred Armisen, Leslie Mann, Peter Ser­afi­now­icz, and Pedro Pas­cal. Best of all, he’ll be respon­si­ble for keep­ing Borat Sub­se­quent Moviefilm star Maria Bakalo­va in Amer­i­can stu­dio com­e­dy for a lit­tle while longer, as she’s on the cast list too.

While that all sounds like the mak­ings of a good movie, this film will present Apa­tow with a bal­anc­ing act not usu­al­ly required by his low-key films about groups of pals hang­ing out and talk­ing shit. There’s an inher­ent humor to the absur­di­ty and indig­ni­ty of the past year’s lock­down, but coax­ing that out while pay­ing due respect to the grav­i­ty of this cri­sis (and the many lives it’s already claimed) will take sen­si­tiv­i­ty and del­i­ca­cy. So long as the joke’s on the A‑listers, it’ll prob­a­bly go just fine.