Like it or loathe it, Boots Riley’s 2018 movie-making debut, Sorry To Bother You, was almost radioactive with creative horsepower and big ideas . A sci-fi socialist satire masquerading behind a sketch comedy premise, and featuring one of the most aggressively bizarre plot swerves in recent memory , the film was a product of years of thinking on Riley’s part, to the point that he originally wrote the screenplay, couldn’t get it made, and ended up just making an album about it with his band The Coup instead . That apparently won’t be a problem for his next effort, though , with Pitchfork reporting that Riley has now scored a commitment to write a new script for Annapurna Pictures.


Details on the project are nil—this actually comes out of a note in passing from a longer report by The Wrap about executive shakeups at the determinedly oddball studio—but as fans of STBY, the idea of Riley having a blank check to explore more of his ideas on American economic life is pretty exciting. It’s not at all clear if he’d end up directing this one, as he did with his previous effort; given that the movie hasn’t even been written yet, that would probably be a case of putting the cart before the horse.