Dakota Johnson, Leslie Mann, and Rebel Wilson join Alison Brie in How To Be Single

Dakota Johnson, Leslie Mann, Dan Stevens, and Rebel Johnson are in talks to help Alison Brie learn How To Be Single. Variety reports that the actors are joining the big-screen adaptation of Liz Tuccillo’s bestselling novel, directed by Christian Ditter. How To Be Single tells the story of a writer and her friends seeking out satisfying relationships in Manhattan. And if that premise sounds familiar, it may be because Tuccillo worked as a writer and director on HBO’s Sex And The City.

Of course, this isn’t a Sex And The City reboot. Yes, both stories feature a plucky heroine who writes about relationships while struggling with her own romantic life, but that’s where the similarities end. In Sex And The City, the friends primarily remained in Manhattan, lest a horrible curse befall them (like having to make Sex And The City 2). Meanwhile, How To Be Single’s protagonist embarks on a journey around the globe, interviewing women about their love lives.

If producers are looking to further differentiate the two properties, there’s plenty of ways to establish a new narrative landscape:

• Alison Brie’s writer can be swept off her feet by a charming but mercurial Italian mogul, “Signor Grande.”
• Her publicist power-broker friend can promote an underground dog-fighting circuit out of a haberdashery basement on the lower East Side.
• Instead of her lawyer friend dating an unfaithful guy who looks and whines like a chipmunk, she can have an actual chipmunk sidekick voiced by Keith David.
• Her art-dealer friend could still date Kyle MacLachlan, but MacLachlan as Special Agent Dale Cooper, recently released from the Black Lodge.
• In the sequel, Alison Brie can traverse the cosmos, interviewing females of countless alien species, before being swept off of her feet by a charming but mercurial Peter “Star-Lord” Quill.

Filming for How To Be Single, which will likely feature none of these ideas, begins in this spring.