'Bad Teacher 2' in development with Columbia Pictures

The expansion of the Bad Teacher universe knows no bounds. On top of the announcement that CBS had added a Bad Teacher spinoff series to their fall roster, Columbia Pictures announced Thursday that they’d begun development on a sequel to the 2011 Cameron Diaz film.

Bad Teacher may have been a critical dark horse (it boasts a 44% Rotten Tomatoes score), but the raunchy comedy, which also starred Jason Segel and Justin Timberlake, was a runaway summer box office success, bringing in $216.2 million worldwide on an estimated $20 million budget.

According to the announcement, the project is being developed for Diaz, but she has not officially signed on for the sequel yet. The busy actress is currently at work on The Other Woman with Leslie Mann and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, and has a number of projects lined up, including Agent: Century 21 with Benicio Del Toro and Jake Kasdan’s Sex Tape.

Kasdan (Orange County) will return to direct the sequel off of a script from Justin Malen, a screenwriter best known at this point for making the 2011 Black List for his screenplay Bastards. The first film was co-written by Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg, who both wrote for The Office.

“We love Justin’s take on the material,” said Columbia Pictures President of Production Hannah Minghella in the press release. “It hits all the notes that made the first film such a breakthrough hit and also takes the characters in a new direction that is fresh and fun.”

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