Richard Pryor Biopic- Eddie Murphy, Mike Epps, Oprah Winfrey, and Kate Hudson

[jabbercash]

The Weinstein Company is ready to greenlight its Richard Pryor biopic, and my, have Harvey Weinstein and Lee Daniels put together a terrific cast. The new additions: Oprah Winfrey will play Pryor’s grandmother, who ran a brothel and raised the iconic comic there; Eddie Murphy will play Pryor’s father, Leroy “Buck Carter” Pryor. Kate Hudson is set to play Pryor’s widow, Jennifer Lee Pryor. And Mike Epps is now locked to play Pryor, a role coveted by a lot of actors. Daniels, who worked with Weinstein and Winfrey on the blockbuster Lee Daniels’ The Butler, will start production in March, after wrapping up the second season of his hit Fox series Empire.

The script is by Bill Condon and Daniels’ Empire collaborator Danny Strong, and Bruce Cohen and Jennifer Lee Pryor are deeply involved in the process as producers. The emergence of Epps was not unexpected, but it is hard not to like his backstory on this one. Deadline revealed in 2014 that Epps had emerged as the likely choice after a killer audition, one that was done for Daniels when Epps was competing against a crop of actors that included Michael B. Jordan, Marlon Wayans and Nick Cannon. Epps and Wayans each won the role in previous incarnations of the film, with Wayans set in the version at Sony when Condon was directing and Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison was producing.

Lee Daniels' projects have been mixed lately, but it'll be interesting to see how this will turn out.