The body swap genre has long existed on a simple premise: What if two people with completely opposite worldviews experienced life through each other’s eyes? Genre classics include Freaky Friday (a child switches bodies with an adult), 18 Again! (where a teenager swaps bodies with an 81-year-old coma patient), Like Father Like Son (where a kid swaps bodies with a surgeon), and The Hot Chick (an attractive person swaps bodies with Rob Schneider).
But you haven’t seen anything yet because Hollywood has now come up with a body swap movie that makes all these movies look like exercise runs. It has used advanced scientific and mathematical formulas to locate the two actors currently working on planet Earth, who are completely opposite in every way imaginable, and built a film about their infinite and complex differences. That’s right, there’s going to be a body swap movie starring Julia Roberts and Jennifer Aniston soon.
I know right? Try to get that in your head for an impossible moment if your brain allows it. So far there is no title or logline for this film, but why would you need one? You could walk into any studio in Hollywood and just say the words “Jennifer Aniston swaps bodies with Julia Roberts” and the execs would just start throwing suitcases full of money at you, eager to see how you’re doing the whole galaxy of Dramatizing differences might exist between Julia Roberts and Jennifer Aniston.
Opposites… Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan in Freaky Friday (2003). Photo: Rex FeaturesWell, obviously I know what you’re thinking here. You’re like, “Wait a minute, Julia Roberts and Jennifer Aniston don’t seem that different to me.” But that’s where you’re wrong, my poor sweet summer fool. They are completely different people in every way. For example, while Jennifer Aniston is a divorced white millionaire born in 1969, Julia Roberts is a divorced white millionaire born in 1967. And while Roberts first rose to fame in comedy before reaching a point of critical acclaim with her starring role in Aniston, a Dramatic Movie, she first rose to fame in comedy before achieving a point of critical acclaim by starring in a dramatic TV show . Completely different.
The list goes on. Julia Roberts appeared on Friends once, but Jennifer Aniston appeared on Friends 236 times. Julia Roberts has been in films with Brad Pitt, but Jennifer Aniston actually married him. What I’m trying to say is that they are complete and total atomic opposites of each other. If Jennifer Aniston stole your phone and was placed in a police cordon with Julia Roberts, there is undoubtedly a 60% chance that you would correctly identify her and not Roberts. Oh good, I give up. They are identical.
And it’s not impossible to assume that’s actually the point. The director of this upcoming body swap movie is Max Barbakow, whose last film Palm Springs was an amazing comedy that managed to update and subvert the basic plot of Groundhog Day to a compelling extent. This is a man who obviously knows how to play with genres. And after decades of body swap comedy about people swapping their physical and emotional opposites, it’s not about time someone made a movie about one woman swapping bodies with another woman who might just as well be her exact genetic copy could be?
Obviously that sounds like a terrible idea because there’s absolutely no dramatic tension in it, but that’s because we’re not Max Barbakow. At this stage, Barbakov seems like the best possible person to milk every last drop of juice from a premise that’s basically “glamorous woman looks in mirror.”
No release date has been set for this Aniston-Roberts body swap extravaganza, but hopefully it will be soon. The world needs this film.