Vince Vaughn tackles drama in Sunny And 68

Vince Vaughn is making a rare return to drama for Gavin O’Connor’s Sunny And 68 at Universal.

The film will see a poker superstar suffering a spectacular embarrassment on national TV thanks to his alcoholism.

He returns home to upstate New York to see if he can reclaim the money he’s sent to his mother in the 20 years since he’s been home. But he discovers that she’s dying of cancer, is raising a 5-year-old girl who is his daughter and has engaged his former high school girlfriend to help care for the child.

Vaughn in mind

Apparently it won’t be all sour faced drama – O’Connor tells Variety that he wrote the part with Vaughn in mind and there are plenty of comic overtones.

"It's a story of how three generations of women teach this character to become a man," says O'Connor, who co-wrote with Anthony Tambakis. The title’s a reference to the mother’s constant claim about the weather despite freezing conditions.

Don’t expect to see it soon, though: O’Connor is preparing to direct mixed martial arts drama Warrior, while Vaughn is off shooting Couples Retreat with Jon Favreau.

Sunny won’t start filming until February 2010, and if it suffers the same fate as O’Connor’s long-delayed cop drama Pride And Glory, it might not be seen until after 2012. Which as any Mayan box office expert will tell you, doesn’t bode well.