Holmes will direct and star in the “Happy Hours” trilogy alongside Jackson, whom she dated on and off-screen in the late 1990s.
Dawson’s Creek stars Katie Holmes and Joshua Jackson announced an ambitious reunion on Monday with Happy Hours, a trilogy of romantic dramedies to be directed by Holmes. The film series marks Holmes and Jackson’s first joint acting project since the enduring teen drama bowed in 2003.
Per the official synopsis, Happy Hours will tell “a story about two people navigating their relationship within the challenges of careers and family responsibilities and the pursuit of love despite life’s inevitable obstacles. The film is a character driven dramedy that explores the emotional journey of young loves who reconnect as adults, with the connective thread of shared joys, loss, and hope.”
Monday’s Happy Hours announcement notes that the first entry in the film series is set to enter production this summer. But candid photos captured the same day of Holmes and Jackson together shooting a mystery project on the streets of New York suggest that production may have already commenced.
Holmes, 46, and Jackson, 47, played strong-willed tomboy Joey Potter and covertly complicated jokester Pacey Witter, respectively, throughout Dawson’s Creek’s six-season run on The WB. Though series creator Kevin Williamson intended for Holmes’ character to eventually end up with the series titular star, James Van Der Beek’s Dawson Leery, it was Jackson’s Pacey Witter she ended up having more chemistry with. The pair even dated in real life from 1998-1999.
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The Joey-Pacey relationship was fraught with complexities and threatened to split permanently apart many times, but fans advocated for Joey to ultimately choose Pacey over Dawson in the 2003 series finale — and so did Holmes and Jackson. Showrunner Tom Kapinos revealed in 2023 that “Katie freaked out” when she learned her character was written to end up with Dawson, demanding it be Pacey instead. Jackson, meanwhile, called himself “the advocate” of Joey-Pacey endgame to Entertainment Weekly in 2022.
“I had a whole conversation with Kevin about this. Like ‘Look, I get it. This is the idea that you had in your head, but I’m just gonna ask you to watch the tale of the tape and this is the more interesting end for these characters,'” he recalled.
“I’m going to miss the gang for sure,” Jackson recently reflected on the medical drama. “I hope they got the same thing that we got out of it, which was that it was a beautiful, over-the-top kind of experience that was like nothing else on television, I don’t think.”
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