CinemaCon Report: 'Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates,' the Oddest Biopic of the Year

Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates, the upcoming comedy starring Zac Efron and Adam DeVine, is based on real guys named Mike and Dave who needed real wedding dates. So technically it should ultimately fall in the same Netflix bucket as The Theory of Everything, The Danish Girl, and the non-Eddie Redmayne-starring Steve Jobs — i.e., the biopic.

“Yeah, it’s really an origin story,” Efron told Yahoo Movies at CinemaCon in Las Vegas, hours after Fox had premiered an extended clip, in which Kumail Nanjiani gives co-star Sugar Lyn Beard a “preposterously filthy naked massage” (as one outlet put it).

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There are conflicting reports about just how accurate the comedy is, depending on who you ask. The basic premise is fact-based: In 2013, bros Mike and Dave Stangle put an ad on Craigslist soliciting female companions for their sister’s wedding. “Rather than ask some fringe women in our lives to go and face the inevitable 'does this mean he wants to take it to the next level!?’ questions, we’d rather bring complete strangers and just figure it out,” they wrote. That much is adapted into the movie version, which then heads to Hawaii for a series of very R-rated comic misadventures. “There’s fist-fights, there’s accidental fires, there are horses that are let loose, Ecstasy trips,” DeVine explained. “It goes crazy,” said Anna Kendrick, who along with Aubrey Plaza, is one of the out-of-control young women who accept Mike and Dave’s invitations.

DeVine, Kendrick, and Efron at CinemaCon (Getty Images)

Efron, DeVine, and Kendrick say the film deviates from the true story once the action moves to paradise. But the Stangle brothers (strappingly tall men Kendrick calls “the f–king Winklevoss twins” from another biopic, The Social Network) may think otherwise… sometimes.

“I’ve heard multiple stories from them,” DeVine said. “They were like, 'Actually, after watching the movie, it’s almost exactly how it happened.’ I’m like, 'What?’ But when we were shooting the movie, and we just had the script, they came during shooting and they were like, 'Just the first part, we posted the Craigslist ad, it went kind of crazy, we met a bunch of girls. That’s the only legit real part. And then everything else is a little make-believe.”

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Efron jumps in: “And then I saw them by the pool and they said, '80 percent definitely happened. 80 percent’s definitely true.’”

Regardless, the cast has had a blast hanging out with their movie’s real-life inspirations. “They’re awesome,” DeVine said. “They’re like the most fun guys to party with.”

That could explain why their memories might be a little fuzzy. And hey, it wouldn’t be a biopic if there wasn’t a little controversy on how accurate it was to reality. Just ask Eddie Redmayne.

Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates opens July 8. Watch the trailer: