Jonathan Levine has two films under his belt: All The Boys Love Mandy Lane, which I appreciated and The Wackness, which I loved. Now he’s adding a third to his resume, and it couldn’t be more different than the first two. The Sitter is a comedy for Fox Atomic that sounds a lot like Adventures in Babysitting, but is not the remake of that ‘classic’ that Disney has in the works right now.
In The Sitter a college student who gets suspended for a semester is wrangled into babysitting for the neighbor kids, ‘two boys and a wild 8-year-old
girl,’ according to the Hollywood Reporter. Except for the gender of the babysitter and the circumstances of the babysitting, this sounds more than a lot like Adventures in Babysitting.
I like Levine as an artist and a person. He has a ‘romantic thriller’ that he wrote called Positive that’s in the works, and he wrote an adaptation of Echelon Vendetta for Sony, so he has other balls in the air, and I like the idea of him tackling a picture that could be more family friendly. Keep the audience guessing, after all. I just hope that The Sitter has something more than generic retread going for it.