Don’t say we told you so. Because it’s supposed to be on the down-low. But Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who made the football-themed Disney movie “The Game Plan” here back in 2006, is heading back to Boston to film a comedy/action flick with Kevin Hart called “Central Intelligence.”
The flick, scheduled to start shooting in the spring, is being directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber of “We’re the Millers” fame. Ed Helms, Thurber’s leading man in “Millers,” is producing.
The story begins at a class reunion, where a former high school sports star (Hart) meets a former classmate (Johnson), who was bullied back in the day. Hart is now an accountant and the former school outcast is a CIA contract killer who convinces the number-cruncher to join him on a mission. Action and hilarity ensue.
You may recall that the last time The Rock was in town, he was playing the quarterback of the local NFL team — but he wasn’t Tom Brady. Because for the movie’s purposes, Johnson’s Joe Kingman was the QB of the Boston Rebels. (Disney and the NFL couldn’t come to terms on an agreement to have Dwayne’s team be the Patriots and, let’s face it, The Rock may be an action hero, but he’s no TB12.)
Anyway, Kingman was a guitar-playing, pigskin-hurling playboy whose party-hearty lifestyle is tackled for a loss when the 7-year-old daughter he never knew he had turns up at this door.
Johnson’s trip to Boston back in 2006 was notable for one other thing: It’s where he met galpal Lauren Hashian. The Rock was married to his college sweetheart, Dany Garcia, when he started filming “The Game Plan,” but at some point he met Lauren — the daughter of Sib Hashian, the former drummer for the rock band Boston. Johnson and Garcia divorced in 2008 and she married her ex’s former personal trainer Dave Rienzi in 2014. Johnson and Hashian are still together.
But enough of that …
Also filming in Boston this spring, “The Broad Squad,” a fictionalized account of the first female patrol officers to graduate from Boston’s police academy back in the 1970s. The idea for the show came from Dorchester homegal Alexandra Lyon, an actress who comes from a family of cops — including some members of the real Broad Squad.
Bess Wohl, an actress-writer and Harvard grad, will write the script, and ABC, which commissioned the pilot, is producing along with Fake Empire and Kapital Entertainment.
File Under: Roll ’Em.