Mindy Kaling and Brooklyn Nine-Nine's Dan Goor are writing Legally Blonde 3

Big Legally Blonde moves tonight: As reported by Deadline, Mindy Kaling and Dan Goor (who previously sold a buzzy wedding comedy starring Kaling and Priyanka Chopra last year) are going to write the third Legally Blonde movie. This is the first new Legally Blonde 3 development since 2018 when Reese Witherspoon confirmed that the movie was in the works and that she would be returning to star, but original writers Kirsten Smith and Karen McCullah were still attached at that point. Supposedly, the plan was to do a soft reboot on the series with a third movie that would be less political and more family-oriented, the idea being that kids who discovered the movie on DVD or streaming in more recent years would be the target audience rather than people who were old enough to see movies way back in the early 2000s.

The Kaling/Goor version, though, will be an “entirely new fresh spin” that jettisons everything Smith and McCullah had originally planned, suggesting that this will be a complete reversal of that old plan. We don’t know any specifics, but Witherspoon is still on board and that’s as encouraging a sign as any. As for Kaling and Goor, she should be a household name (she had a show with her name in the title, for one thing), while he’s the co-creator of Brooklyn Nine-Nine and was a writer on Parks And Recreation. They’re a pair of heavy-hitters, in other words, and it suggests that MGM (the studio behind the series) is aiming for something a little better than nostalgia bait.