EXCLUSIVE: Judd Apatow has attached to direct and Steven Spielberg has come aboard to produce Cola Wars, the film in development at Sony. Spielberg will produce through his Amblin Entertainment banner.
Deadline revealed back in April that the studio bought the project for $1 million-plus as a pitch, telling the true story of Pepsi’s attempt to challenge Coca-Cola’s century-long reign as the world’s top cola. It uncapped the “Cola Wars” of the mid-1980s, which included everything from Michael Jackson’s fiery mishap to the New Coke debacle, as the ultimate underdog tale of history’s most iconic second-place contender (Pepsi) vying for the No. 1 spot (Coca-Cola).
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The Cola Wars pitch is being written by Jason Shuman and Ben Queen. Shuman is the co-creator/writer of Apple’s hit show Acapulco and was executive producer on HBO’s Winning Time, and the producer of 2022’s Oscar-nominated indie To Leslie. Queen is currently adapting Naomi Novik’s fantasy novel His Majesty’s Dragon as an hourlong series for Fox, and he recently adapted the novella A Note of Explanation by Vita Sackville-West for Netflix. He was the writer of Cars 2 and Cars 3 for Pixar, as well as the creator of NBC’s A to Z and Powerless.
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This is early in the development process, but the ingredients are here for a movie about an iconic product on the order of the Ben Affleck-directed Air, about the battle by Nike to win a shoe deal with Michael Jordan for the sneaker line that transformed the company. Maia Eyre is overseeing Cola Wars for Sony.
Apatow is repped by WME and Mosaic, while Spielberg is repped by CAA. Shuman and Queen are repped by Verve, and Shuman is managed by Jon Huddle at Fourth Wall.