Men in Black is one of my all-time favorites. And I thought that 21 Jump Street and 22 Jump Street were two of the funniest movies of the last half-decade. But the idea of crossing them over is just bizarre.

I have a lot of reservations about this. There’s nothing inherently funny or interesting about a spoof of an 80s TV show about cops pretending to be teenagers – What made the Jump Street movies so brilliant was the writing and directing. But this has a different writer and director. And the sequels to MIB were, well, I can’t come up with a nicer way to describe them than steaming piles of crap trying to coast on your memories of the original.

But it could be good. This certainly doesn’t seem like a cynical cash grab movie. Usually cynical cash grabs consist of a studio executive saying “Here’s a property people are vaguely familiar with that. Let’s make a movie out of that, plan out the toys and fast food tie-ins, and then come up with a story as an afterthought.” However, the idea of a MIB/21 Jump Street crossover is so strange that I can’t imagine a genesis for it that doesn’t involve someone coming up with a good idea for a story first, and then packaging the movie to support that. (Well, I can imagine a genesis that involves lots of drugs, but they’d have to come up with a good story in order to convince the studio to go along with that crazy idea.)

Hollywood may be out of ideas, but it’s nice that they can at least come up with interesting ways to combine their old ideas. This movie may end up being amazing or it may end up a disaster, but it’s unlikely to be a boring rehash of generic crap we’ve seen a thousand times before.