The bodyswap genre has long existed on a simple premise: what if two people with entirely opposite worldviews got to experience life through each others’ eyes. Classics of the genre have involved Freaky Friday (a child switches bodies with an adult), 18 Again! (where a teenager switches bodies with an 81-year-old coma patient), Like Father Like Son (where a child switches bodies with a surgeon) and The Hot Chick (an attractive person switches bodies with Rob Schneider).
But you ain’t seen nothing yet, because Hollywood has now devised a bodyswap movie that makes all these films look like practice runs. It has used advanced scientific and mathematical formulas in order to locate the two actors currently working on planet Earth who are total opposites in every conceivable way, and built a film around their infinite and complex differences. That’s right, there will soon be a bodyswap movie starring Julia Roberts and Jennifer Aniston.
I know, right? Try to get your head around that for one impossible moment, if your brain will let you. So far there is no title or logline for this movie, but then again, 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 executives would just start flinging suitcases full of money at you, eager to see how you could dramatise the entire galaxy of differences that exist between Julia Roberts and Jennifer Aniston.
Now, obviously I know what you’re thinking here. You’re thinking “Wait a minute, Julia Roberts and Jennifer Aniston don’t actually seem all that different to me”. But that’s where you’re wrong, my poor sweet summer fool. They’re wildly different people in every way. For example, while Jennifer Aniston is a divorced white millionaire actress who was born in 1969, Julia Roberts is a divorced white millionaire actress who was born in 1967. And while Roberts initially found fame in comedy before reaching a point of critical acclaim by starring in a dramatic movie, Aniston actually initially found fame in comedy before reaching 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 put in a police line-up with Julia Roberts, there is unquestionably a 60% chance that you would correctly identify her and not Roberts. Oh fine, I give up. They’re identical.
And it is not impossible to assume that this is actually the point. The director of this forthcoming bodyswap movie is Max Barbakow, whose last film Palm Springs was an astonishing comedy that managed to update and subvert the basic plot of Groundhog Day to a winning extent. This is a man who evidently knows how to mess with genre. And after decades of bodyswap comedies about people swapping places with their physical and emotional opposites, isn’t it time that someone made a film where a woman swaps bodies with another woman who may as well be her exact genetic replica?
Obviously that sounds like a terrible idea, because it contains exactly zero dramatic tension whatsoever, but this is because we are not Max Barbakow. At this stage, Barbakow seems like the best possible person to milk every last drop of juice from a premise which is basically “glamorous woman looks in mirror”.
No release date has been set for this Aniston-Roberts bodyswap extravaganza, but hopefully it will happen soon. The world needs this film.
