That Kendrick Lamar-Produced Trey Parker Movie Is Moving To Next Year (Wait, What?)

Technically, the “news” here is that Paramount Pictures has pushed the release date for its untitled Trey Parker movie from July 4th of this year to March 20, 2026. However, the news to me is that Trey Parker directed a movie he produced with his South Park co-creator, Matt Stone, and … Kendrick Lamar. As in, Lamar was splitting his time between finalizing his latest album, squashing Drake like a bug, and producing a comedy. But perhaps the most interesting part of this absolute word salad is that there is practically nothing known about the project!

Well, that’s not exactly true. Paramount teased the film at last year’s CinemaCon, with studio film chief Brian Robbins saying it’s “one of the funniest and most original scripts we’ve ever read.” That script comes from Vernon Chatman, a writer/director/producer who worked on The Chris Rock Show and Late Night with Conan O’Brien in the ’90s and went on to co-create Wonder Showzen and The Heart, She Holler. He has also been a longtime writer on South Park, though you may be most familiar with him as the voice of Towelie, the bath towel who likes to smoke weed. So to update our word salad: Kendrick Lamar produced a movie, written by Towelie and directed by Trey Parker.

As for the movie itself, it’s in the can; it filmed last year, though nothing about it has been revealed — not the cast, the title, or even the logline, though reportedly the comedy is about a young Black man who interns as a slave re-enactor at a living history museum. So why is Paramount pushing the release date? Everybody is just too busy to promote it. Lamar is going on tour, and the South Park guys are doing South Park things.

The movie will be the first feature film to come out of pgLang, the multimedia production company Lamar founded with partner Dave Free, who also serves as a producer. Stone and Parker are producing under their Park County banner. And if any detail of this is weirder than — gestures above — it’s that this isn’t even the first time Lamar and Free have collaborated with Stone and Parker. In 2022, Stone and Parker’s deepfake startup Deep Voodoo worked on the music video for Lamar’s track “The Heart Part 5.”

So anyway, this is the hole I fell down today. I promise it’s not an April Fool’s joke!