If there’s one (living) Hollywood couple I wish was still working together it’s Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas. If only to make another sequel to Romancing the Stone. Never mind that the first follow-up, The Jewel of the Nile, was a disappointment. There could have been a really great franchise there had its stars not broken up, with subsequent films involving one-off stories set in different, romantic parts of the world. Of course, Danny DeVito would be necessary for each film, too, but really it was the chemistry — good and bad — between Turner and Douglas that makes those movies work.

Alas, we’ll never get that third installment of the original series. But we are, no surprise, getting a remake, as Monika disappointedly told us a year ago. And Pajiba has an update on the project, which appears to be moving forward with Robert Luketic (The Ugly Truth) directing from a script by Dan McDermott (Eagle Eye). Dustin Rowles at Pajiba believes this will be Luketic’s next film after finishing the upcoming Killers, rather than the remake of Barbarella. And it’s easy to assume the director will cast Katherine Heigl in Turner’s role. As for Douglas’ adventurer character, perhaps Luketic can go for an Ugly Truth reunion and go with Gerard Butler.

That may not sound very good, but no pair-up is really going to match the original, so it doesn’t really matter. But I will hold out some hope that McDermott went with a slightly different locale than South America and a slightly different plot that could almost make this a new spin-off one-off. There’s no reason this couldn’t just be a kind of new installment, only with new leads, like a couples version of the James Bond franchise. And then there’d be no reason DeVito couldn’t return. Sometimes when I watch It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, I imagine that Frank is actually Ralph, from Romancing and Jewel, retired.

While I can try to see a silver lining in that redo, I’m having less luck warming up to Pajiba’s other reported remake in the works: Overboard. In spite of its misogyny and immature humor, I have a soft spot for Garry Marshall’s amnesia comedy, in which a crude carpenter kidnaps a bitchy socialite when she loses her memory, making her think she’s wife to him and mother to his four sons. Yeah, it’s basically a big rape joke wrapped inside a plot better suited for a sitcom pilot. But like Turner and Douglas, real-life couple Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell are an entertaining pair together. And, as a sort of flip-back on Mr. Mom, it can be an interesting movie to look at from a feminist film theory perspective.

Rowles claims that Heigl has actually already been offered Hawn’s role in this remake (Butler for Russell’s? You know the execs went there). And a script is being written by Bill Collage and Adam Cooper (Accepted). Honestly, after seeing Kate Hudson dolled up like a go-go dancer in Nine, and looking so much like Hawn, I keep picturing her starring in remakes of all her mother’s films. That doesn’t ease my mind, as I don’t think Hudson is nearly as good an actress as Hawn is/was. But I’d still prefer her to Heigl. Anyway, the only real casting issue for an Overboard remake is finding another kid who is so good at doing Pee-Wee Herman voices.

Thanks Cinematical.