2025 has been a big year for the Safdie brothers, even if they’re no longer working together.
Benny Safdie wrote and directed the The Smashing Machine, a biopic on MMA legend Mark Kerr starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. And on Christmas Day, A24 will release Marty Supreme, a much-anticipated feature inspired by the life of table tennis phenom Marty Reisman. The film is generating plenty of Oscar buzz for Safdie and his leading man, Timothée Chalamet, alike.
Both brothers play to their strengths in each feature. While Josh’s Marty Supreme has been said to be another anxiety trip, Benny repeats the success of Good Time and Uncut Gems and brings a tremendous performance out of Johnson.
Before their creative split, the Safdies had plenty in the works together—films that never materialized but probably should have. With the hype around Marty Supreme mounting, we decided to take stock of them. From a remake of an Eddie Murphy classic to an Adam Sandler
Before their creative split, the Safide brothers had plenty in the works together. From an Eddie Murphy classic to an Adam Sandler reunion, here are the movies Josh and Benny Safdie were reportedly looking toward.
48 Hrs.
Following the success of Good Time in 2017, it was announced that the Safdie brothers would tackle a remake of 48 Hrs., the film that launched Eddie Murphy’s career as a Hollywood leading man and is widely considered the original buddy-cop comedy. Josh was set to write the screenplay alongside longtime writing partner Ronald Bronstein and comedian Jerrod Carmichael.
By 2018, Adam Sandler had at long last signed on to Uncut Gems—a film the brothers conceived with him in mind in 2009—leaving 48 Hrs. on the back burner. When asked about its status during the Uncut Gems press tour, Josh declared the project to have evolved past a remake.
“We wrote a few drafts with the studio and it became very clear that we don't know how to do a remake. We only know how to do our own ideas,” Josh explained to MovieWeb in 2019. “I met [48 Hours. director] Walter Hill recently. He came to see a screening of Uncut Gems, and I know he had seen Good Time. I said to him, ‘Just to get this off the table, I know you know we were hired to do this remake of your film.’ And he's like, ‘Yeah. I was so confused because I've seen your movies now and these guys are definitely not short of any original ideas. Why do they need to remake something?’”
Josh elaborated that the idea had evolved into an original story, though this was the final time he spoke on it.
Untitled Adam Sandler movie
In April 2022, IndieWire reported by that the Safdie Brothers would be reuniting for a Netflix feature. Adam Sandler would play a sports memorabilia dealer trying to capitalize on a retired baseball star’s comeback attempt in the 1990s. Ben Affleck was in talks to play the athlete, with Megan Thee Stallion and Steve Harvey also being circled for roles. Sandler revealed the first draft of the script to be 340 pages.
The project struck out, both figuratively and literally. The WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes of 2023 caused delays in production, with the window closed on filming key scenes during the MLB season.
“We kind of missed the opportunity of baseball season because of the strike,” Sandler told Collider in 2023. “A lot of it was gonna be shot during live baseball. So it's gonna take a minute. We're figuring it all out right now. I'm not sure when it's gonna happen.”
The project, which later evolved into a Josh Safdie solo feature, was halted in lieu of Marty Supreme.
Superhero movie
In a 2017 Guardian profile by The Guardian of the Safdie Brothers at the time of Good Time’s release, Josh shared that the pair had been approached by a major studio to helm a superhero sequel.
“It’s weird, a studio offered us to do a sequel to this huge comic-book thing. We just said, ‘No, we don’t wanna do that!’”
Given the timeline, fans have speculated that the film in question was a DC property, with all signs pointing to 2019’s Joker or 2021’s The Suicide Squad. Both films take on the grittier tone that the directors are known for; the search for a director to helm the latter was notoriously widespread. Mel Gibson, Ruben Fleischer, and Daniel Espinosa were also among the names Warner Bros. had eyed. James Gunn ultimately took the project.
