Parker & Stone Apologize for Whitney Springs Delay — SkimNews
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- Trey Parker and Matt Stone issued an apology to partners at pgLang and Paramount for delays on the musical film Whitney Springs, saying they "take full responsibility" and still believe in the project.
- Whitney Springs was written by longtime South Park writer Vernon Chatman with Kendrick Lamar set as a producer alongside Parker, Stone, and Dave Free, and features original and previously-unreleased Lamar music.
- Paramount first pushed the film from 2025 to 2026, then removed it from its schedule entirely last November in the wake of the Paramount-Skydance merger closure.
- At CinemaCon 2024, then-Paramount CEO Brian Robbins called the script "one of the funniest and most original scripts we've ever read" and announced it would enter production that summer; Lamar was later spotted filming in California.
- The film follows a young Black man interning as a slave re-enactor at a living history museum who discovers his white girlfriend's ancestors once owned his; Parker plays the racist Midwestern mayor.
- Lamar previously collaborated with Parker and Stone on his 2022 music video "The Heart Part 5," directed by Dave Free, which used digitally produced "deep fake" morphs of celebrities including Kanye West, Will Smith, and Nipsey Hussle.
Why it matters: The apology makes public what had been a quiet disappearance from Paramount's slate: a Lamar-affiliated prestige project that the studio's own then-CEO championed as a standout script has gone from a 2025 release to off the calendar entirely, leaving pgLang and Paramount waiting indefinitely on a film that was already deep into production.
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