Warner Bros. is developing a new 'You've Got Mail' with Jason Orley directing

Warner Bros. is developing a new version of "You've Got Mail," the 1998 Nora Ephron comedy that cast Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan as bookselling rivals who fall for each other online. Jason Orley, who directed the Amazon romantic comedy "I Want You Back," is attached to direct.

Deadline first reported the project Tuesday, and Variety and The Hollywood Reporter followed with their own confirmation. The plot is being kept under wraps. The Hollywood Reporter said the film will not remake the original but will follow a new story. That is a meaningful distinction for a title this closely tied to its two stars.

Orley is writing the current draft, working from an earlier screenplay by Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont. Neal Moritz and Tania Landau are producing through Moritz's Original Film banner. No cast, release date or distribution plan has been reported, so this is a studio project in development, not a movie on a schedule.

The central creative problem is obvious: the original's engine belongs to its moment. Hanks played Joe Fox, the heir to a chain of big-box bookstores, and Ryan played Kathleen Kelly, who runs a small children's bookshop in Manhattan that his new superstore threatens to put out of business. In person they bicker. Over AOL instant messages, under screen names, they fall in love without realizing who the other is.

Both halves of that setup have aged. Anonymous online correspondence that slowly turns romantic was novel when the film came out; in an era of dating apps, social media profiles and reverse-image searches, two people staying mysteries to each other for months takes real effort to justify. The retail fight has shifted too. The chain superstore that played villain in 1998 now looks more like an underdog next to online sellers, which makes Joe Fox's business a strange stand-in for corporate menace.

That is likely why the project is pitched as a new take instead of a remake. The smartest version would keep the emotional mechanism, two people who clash in public and connect in private, and find a current setting where that kind of double life still makes sense. Deadline's report framed the question the same way, wondering what the story looks like long after AOL's peak.

There is also a strong precedent for updating this material. "You've Got Mail" was itself a reworking of Miklós László's 1937 Hungarian play "Parfumerie," which had already been adapted into Ernst Lubitsch's 1940 film "The Shop Around the Corner," with James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan as feuding shop clerks who are secretly pen pals. Ephron moved the story from a Budapest gift shop to the Upper West Side and swapped paper letters for email. Another refit is consistent with how the property has always worked.

Orley is a sensible pick for this kind of film. His feature debut, the Pete Davidson comedy "Big Time Adolescence," premiered in dramatic competition at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, where Hulu acquired it. He followed it with "I Want You Back" in 2022, a romantic comedy for Amazon starring Charlie Day, Jenny Slate and Gina Rodriguez, made with writers Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger. That film showed he can handle the genre's mix of sweetness and awkward comedy without tipping into either extreme.

He recently finished post-production on his third feature, "Close Personal Friends," an Amazon comedy starring Brie Larson, Jack Quaid, Lily Collins and Henry Golding, produced by Maximum Effort with Aptaker and Berger. On television, he directed six episodes of Davidson's 2023 Peacock series "Bupkis" and has worked with Davidson on several comedy specials.

Kaplan and Elfont bring long genre experience. The partners, who met at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, wrote and directed the teen comedy "Can't Hardly Wait" and the "Josie and the Pussycats" film, and wrote the romantic comedies "Made of Honor" and "Leap Year." Last year they set up two projects at Paramount: "Guys with No Friends," an R-rated comedy acquired after a bidding war, and "The Romantic," a romantic comedy with Dave Bautista. The arrangement here, with a director rewriting an established team's draft, is a common one, and it suggests Orley's voice will shape the final script.

Moritz, best known as a producer on the "Fast & Furious" franchise, has been leaning into the genre lately. He most recently produced "Beach Read," the adaptation of Emily Henry's bestselling novel.

Whatever form the new film takes, it will be measured against one of the defining romantic comedies of its decade. Warner Bros. released "You've Got Mail" in December 1998, and it grossed more than $250 million worldwide. Variety reported the budget at about $65 million. Ryan earned a Golden Globe nomination for best actress in a comedy or musical. The supporting cast included Greg Kinnear, Parker Posey, Jean Stapleton, Steve Zahn, Heather Burns and Dave Chappelle.

The film was also the third pairing of Hanks and Ryan, after "Joe Versus the Volcano" and Ephron's "Sleepless in Seattle," and their last film with Ephron, who died in 2012. Much of the original's appeal came from that partnership and from Ephron's specific feel for New York, with its cafes, autumn streets and neighborhood shops. A new team can't reproduce that chemistry, and trying to would invite the harshest comparisons.

That is why the decision to tell a new story looks like the right call, and also the riskier one. A straight remake would trade on nostalgia and come up short almost by definition. An original story under a famous title has to justify the title, and it only works if the filmmakers find a modern equivalent of the 1998 hook: a form of intimacy that lets two people know each other deeply while missing the most obvious fact about each other.

For now, Warner Bros. has a director, a draft in progress and producers with recent rom-com credits. The casting will show what kind of movie the studio has in mind, and none has been announced.