Disney deals for 'Yosemite Three'

Comedy feature to star Tim Allen

By MICHAEL FLEMING

Allen

In a deal worth high-six against seven figures, the Walt Disney Co. has acquired the pitch "Yosemite Three" and will develop it as a comic vehicle for Tim Allen.

The writing team of Michael Carnes and Josh Gilbert will pen the script; Mandeville partners David Hoberman and Todd Lieberman produce.

Allen will play a corporate employee who heads off on a company retreat. Bored with a mandated nature hike, he and two others hole up in a bar and are reported missing in Yosemite National Park. They longer they stay missing, the more popular they become in news reports. Disney bought the pitch preemptively for Allen, who is coming off the hit "Wild Hogs," for which the studio is fast-tracking a sequel.

The scribes, who won an Emmy writing for "The Wayne Brady Show," have made a flurry of big-buck script deals. First was "Mr. Woodcock," the upcoming New Line comedy that stars Billy Bob Thornton and Seann William Scott, and "Furry Vengeance," which Samuel L. Jackson will topline for New Line. They got $1.5 million in a Paramount pitch for "Stalker, A Love Story," which sold with Owen Wilson attached, then got $1 million from Paramount for "The Worst Man," a comedy to be produced by Jimmy Miller.

Hoberman produced and Lieberman exec produced Allen starrer "The Shaggy Dog," and Lieberman was a producer of "Wild Hogs."