They’re Making a Hooters Movie. Yes, a Movie.

It would appear there’s going to be a Hooters movie. Not a movie set in Hooters. Not a comedy where the characters work at Hooters. An actual movie about the founding of Hooters, because after Air, BlackBerry, Tetris, Flamin’ Hot and every other corporate origin story Hollywood has managed to squeeze onto a screen, we’ve apparently reached the portion of cinematic history where we learn we just needed orange shorts and a lot more boobs.

It’s called Hooters: The Movie, which I appreciate because nobody wasted three weeks trying to come up with something clever like Way of the Wings.

The independently produced movie is coming directly from members of the original Hooters founding group, with co-founder Ed Droste producing and co-writing the screenplay. Jon Rosenbaum, whose credits include Woody Woodpecker Goes to Camp and Benchwarmers 2: Breaking Balls — both of which are modern classics — is directing. Casting is underway, with production currently targeting November around Tampa and Clearwater, Florida, where the original Hooters opened in 1983.

And somehow the actual plot is even more Hooters than I expected. Ted sees a woman named Diane in a spring-break commercial, becomes infatuated with her and convinces his friend Lenny to drive to Clearwater Beach to find her. Diane eventually becomes the first Hooters Girl, the guys accidentally create a restaurant empire, and eventually the federal government gets involved because why the fuck not.

That’s the official premise. A guy sees a hot woman on television and says, essentially, “We should drive across the country and find her,” and somehow this ends with hundreds of restaurants. If I wrote that as fiction, somebody would tell me the protagonist needed a more believable motivation. To which I would ask, “Have you met a man?”

For the record, I’m absolutely not above Hooters. I’ve been there quite a few times. I dated a Hooters waitress. My sister-in-law and her sister both worked there. When I was younger, there was probably no restaurant on Earth I wanted to go to more. Hooters occupied a very specific place in the teenage male imagination where you were pretty sure you were about to enter some forbidden adult wonderland containing beautiful women, chicken wings and everything else civilization had spent centuries trying to achieve.

Then you actually go, and my reaction was more along the lines of, “OK…” because it’s a restaurant. That’s the part some guys apparently never figure out.

There’s a particular kind of man who walks through the doors of a Hooters and suddenly behaves like he’s entered the Playboy Mansion carrying a backstage pass personally signed by Hugh Hefner. The waitress smiles at him and somewhere inside his brain a fuse blows. Suddenly he’s leaning too far across the table, making comments nobody asked for and mistaking “woman being pleasant while doing her job” for undeniable sexual chemistry. Buddy, she brought you mozzarella sticks. Settle the fuck down.

That’s always been the weirdest part of Hooters to me. The restaurant itself is completely honest about what it is. The uniforms aren’t exactly hiding the business model. Nobody accidentally walks into Hooters looking for a quiet farm-to-table experience and suddenly discovers breasts. You know the deal before you pull into the parking lot. Just act like you’ve seen a woman before.

Which is why Hooters: The Movie could actually be fun if it understands how ridiculous its own story is. Rosenbaum has described it as a buddy comedy and inspirational biopic, although there is one gigantic orange-colored asterisk: the guys who founded Hooters are the guys making the movie about the guys who founded Hooters. We may not exactly be dealing with All the President’s Men levels of investigative objectivity here.

If they can make this more in the vein of Road Trip with a sprinkling of The Founder in there, then this has a chance of being something. The production itself even calls the story “mostly true,” which might be the most perfect possible description for a Hooters movie. Mostly true. Close enough. Bring another pitcher.

No cast has been announced yet, and cameras are currently expected to roll in Florida in November. I can’t pretend I’m not curious. Two guys head to Florida chasing a woman they saw on television, accidentally build a restaurant empire around wings, beer and attractive waitresses, and more than forty years later make their own movie about it.

Honestly, maybe the unbelievable part would be if Hollywood didn’t make this movie.