Utkarsh Ambudkar's Rap Musical For Disney+ Lands A Director

As we reported late last year, Utkarsh Ambudkar has a new rap comedy musical in development for Disney+ titled World’s Best.

Despite a casting call going out in November and production on track to begin in early May, according to Deadline, the film has finally found a director in Roshan Sethi.

Sethi won the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature earlier this year for his work on the COVID-centric comedy 7 Days. Interestingly enough, Sethi is also a palliative radiation oncologist and the co-creator of Fox’s hit medical drama series The Resident.

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The film follows Raj Patel, who lives with his mother and feels under pressure for her approval. His father is dead, but Raj has made his dad his imaginary friend. Raj is an expert at math, so much so that he takes math classes with the 11th graders, and is expected to lead the upcoming Mathlympics Competition to victory. But Raj is secretly obsessed with his father’s dream of becoming a rap musician, and (under his ghost-dad’s boastful tutelage) abandons his math studies in an attempt to develop himself as a rapper. Raj almost splits his focus into far too many different areas, and his attempt to achieve multiple goals in life almost loses him everything, including the respect of his friends.

The idea for the film was conceived by Ambudkar, who has recently rose to prominence in Hollywood after bit roles in Pitch Perfect, Mulan, and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway revival of Freestyle Love Supreme. Most recently, he’s appeared in Free Guy, CBS’ Ghosts and Hulu’s The Dropout.

Aside from co-writing the film, he will co-star in it too alongside Punam Patel (Kevin from Work) and Manny Magnus (Home Team).

No word on when the movie will drop on the streaming platform, but with production ramping up now, it wouldn’t be surprising to see it ready for a release early next year.

SOURCE: Deadline