The Heist Movie With Rihanna And Lupita Is Happening

The good news is that the long-awaited, Twitter-spawned heist movie starring Rihanna and Lupita Nyong’o is happening. The bad news is that the Oscar-winning actress isn’t talking about it.

Asked by E! what she could tell them about the movie, the Black Panther star smirked and then said, “I can tell you absolutely nothing about that.”

Just to refresh your memory, the idea for the film came from a 2017 Twitter post responding to a photo of Rihanna and Lupita together in 2014 at a fashion show.

The Twitter user:

Rihanna looks like she scams rich white men and lupita is the computer smart best friend that helps plan the scans https://t.co/PhWs1xd3nj

— mclovin (@sixsxsix) April 18, 2017

Twitter clamored for the movie to actually be made, and both stars said they were game.  Twitter then suggested that Issa Rae should write the script and Ava DuVernay should direct — and the Insecure star and award-winning director also agreed to participate.

In 2017, Entertainment Weekly reported that Netflix had aggressively bid and won the rights to the movie; production was supposed to have begun last year.

By the way, a Tumblr post that predated the 2017 tweet by several years had a similar caption: “They look like they’re in a heist movie with Rihanna as the tough-as-nails leader/master thief and Lupita as the genius computer hacker.”

Vanity Fair later reported that the Twitter users who came up with the concept for the project would be credited, but it’s not clear if the Tumblr user is included in that group.

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