'The Vow' Director Michael Sucsy To Helm Beach Boys Powered Musical

With "The Vow" becoming the first film of 2012 to cross the $100 million mark, director Michael Sucsy is wasting little time is using that leverage to tackle something a bit more ambitious than the three hankie romance. He's already got another love story of sorts, the "Romeo and Juliet" re-telling in "Rosaline" coming together with Lily Collins, Dave Franco and Deborah Ann Woll but he's already looking at what he'll do after that.

The director has signed on to take the helm of an untitled musical, powered by the tunes of the Beach Boys. The famed pop group has been making waves (excuse the pun) in the last little while, with the recent uber-box set edition of Smile and of course, their reunion at the Grammys in advance of a massive 50th anniversary tour. And while the hair may be thinning on top and the paunches getting a little flabbier, the tunes are still among the best pop songs ever written, sophisticated and catchy all at once.

There are no details on the storyline,  it is a fiction based story using their music. So presumably they'll be doing something along the lines of "Mamma Mia!" -- i.e., writing an original story around the music of ABBA. The project has a script from "Erin Brokovich" writer Susannah Grant, with latter day Beach Boys drummer and good friend of the group John Stamos producing along with Craig Zadan and Neil Meron. The trio were also behind the 2000 ABC TV movie "The Beach Boys: An American Family" so they've worked with the band and material before.

All told, this is potentially a good idea but we really hope on the musical end, they don't mess with the Beach Boys tunes and stick with originals and avoid the temptation to get contemporary acts to cover the songs. Sorry Maroon 5 and (especially) Foster The People -- you guys just don't come close. No word on when this roll, but probably not until Sucsy wraps up with "Rosaline." And this project is just another in a small storm of related projects about the Beach Boys including the Aaron Eckhart starring "The Drummer" about Dennis Wilson that will shoot this summer, and Oren Moverman's "unconventional" Brian Wilson biopic that he recently completed writing (and that we hope to hell gets made). [Variety]