Sorry To Bother You director Boots Riley has brought together a strong cast for his new movie, I Love Boosters. More here.
2018’s Sorry To Bother You (pictured) was one of the most impressive films of that year. It was rich with ideas and it boasted the kind of visual and sonic design that could only emerge from a talented multihyphenate who works across film and music. That of course is Boots Riley and even more impressively, it was his debut feature film.
Five years on from the release of Sorry To Bother You, we haven’t seen Riley return to filmmaking. Instead, he’s been working in music, art and television. He wrote and directed I Love Virgo, the Amazon-backed 2023 show that like Sorry To Bother You, blended high-concept storytelling with dazzling production design.
Perhaps it didn’t work quite as well as his feature debut and that might well be because Riley’s style is inherently cinematic. His unbridled creativity is best experienced on a cinema screen and happily, that’s going to happen with his next film, I Love Boosters, being backed by Neon. The film centres ‘on a ring of enterprising boosters (aka shoplifters, equal opportunists) who take aim at a cutthroat fashion maven.’
Production was originally slated to begin this spring but has now (thanks to Deadline) been confirmed to start imminently. What’s more, the cast has been announced and it’s rather impressive. Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, LaKeith Stanfield and Demi Moore are all set to star, with more names yet to be announced.
There’s some very exciting talent here: Keke Palmer put in a memorable performance in Jordan Peele’s Nope at the tail-end of 2022, while Naomi Ackie recently starred in Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut, Blink Twice. LaKeith Stanfield returns to work with Riley again after starring in Sorry To Bother You while Demi Moore (surely playing the ‘cutthroat fashion maven’) is earning plaudits for her role in body horror, The Substance.
Hopefully we’ll see this one appear on cinema screens at some point next year. It’s certainly high on our radar, given the talent involved. If you’re a fan of Sorry To Bother You, check out the chat we had with Stephen Dudro, the film’s production designer about how the film’s visual style was put together.