20th Century Fox
(L-R) Dean Martin, Roger Moore, and Burt Reynolds in "The Cannonball Run."
Warner Bros. has plans to make a "Cannonball Run" reboot, with "Get Hard" director Etan Cohen writing and directing it, as Deadline reports.
The classic 1981 comedy and its sequel starred Burt Reynolds and an all-star cast playing characters who are competing in an illegal cross-country road race. Both films were big box-office hits, directed by "Smokey and the Bandit" director Hal Needham, and they featured the top stars in entertainment of their era: Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr., Dean Martin, Roger Moore, Jackie Chan, Dom DeLuise, Shirley MacLaine, and Merilu Henner, to name a few.
As Reynolds told Business Insider on Wednesday, that's just the trick to making the new "Cannonball" a success: casting as many big names as possible.
20th Century Fox
(L-R) Burt Reynolds, Dean Martin, Shirley MacLaine, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Frank Sinatra in "Cannonball Run II."
"You have to be able to get a lot of people nobody thinks you can get," he said. "That's what we really had fun doing, getting those people."
Reynolds, who's currently doing press for "The Bandit," looking back on the making of "Smokey and the Bandit" (it'll air on CMT later this year), said he hasn't been contacted to be in the"Cannonball" reboot. But he understands why Warner Bros. wants to make it.
"It made a lot of money," he said of the original franchise. "But you have to have fun. With Sinatra, we just let him have fun and then you just go with it. And he did have a good time [making the film]."
If the studio takes Reynolds' advice, it will be fun to see what A-list celebrities they're able to collect for the reboot.
Watch the trailer for the original "Cannonball Run" below.