Ashley Padilla, the Saturday Night Live cast member whose 2024 host-spot rotation made her one of the program’s most-discussed breakout players of the past two seasons, has been cast in The Catch, a Universal Pictures romantic comedy headlined by Emma Stone and Chris Pine. The film, directed by Dave McCary, begins principal photography in New York in July 2026 and is dated for a May 21, 2027 theatrical release.
Padilla will play Stone’s sister in McCary’s script, which centers on a Manhattan-based baseball fan who attends a Yankees-Red Sox series at Yankee Stadium and accidentally deflects the path of a game-winning catch, sending the city’s sporting calendar and her own romantic future into the same set of unforeseen consequences. Deadline reported the casting was finalized late this week after Padilla’s team negotiated a schedule that allows her to return to SNL for the show’s 51st season this fall.
McCary, who is married to Stone in real life and has produced Fresh and Poor Things through their A24-and-Universal-affiliated Fruit Tree banner, is making The Catch his first theatrical directorial credit since his 2017 Sundance launch Brigsby Bear. The project is set up at Universal Pictures with a budget tracking in the $35 million range, the kind of mid-budget original comedy the studio has been quietly rebuilding around since the 2023 Greta Gerwig-Margot Robbie Barbie blueprint reset the audience math for the format.
Pine, fresh off the Star Trek IV reunion and his 2025 Hot Yoga indie, is expected to play the male lead opposite Stone, with the two operating in a romantic-foil register that producers have been described as “early Rob Reiner, late Nora Ephron.” Variety reported the supporting bench will also include casting in the next 30 days for an antagonist baseball-fan character that the script positions as the source of much of the film’s comedic engine.
Padilla, who joined SNL in 2024 as a featured player and was upgraded to repertory cast at the start of the show’s 50th season, was named the year’s breakout SNL voice by both Vulture and Variety. Her sketches across the 2025-26 season have included the recurring “Tabitha Holds Court” courtroom-procedural parody and a number of the season’s most-streamed weekend update bits. NBC’s broader Saturday Night Live ecosystem, with which she will continue to be associated, is the same one Amy Adams discussed at length on Late Night with Seth Meyers Friday, as our coverage of that interview detailed.
The Catch also lands inside an unusually crowded Universal Pictures slate. Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day is currently in its second weekend after a $94 million worldwide opening, and the studio’s Obsession has held strong, beating its own opening week in week two, per our box-office dispatch. A McCary-Stone-Pine-Padilla romantic comedy slotted for the early summer corridor of 2027 fits the studio’s broader pattern of pairing event-spectacle with mid-budget originals.
Stone is in pre-production on a separate untitled Yorgos Lanthimos collaboration that was announced last month and is also attached to the long-developing Jane Bond-style espionage spec her Fruit Tree banner has been shopping. The Catch is her first time fronting an original romantic comedy since 2016’s La La Land, a connection McCary has framed in interviews as a deliberate creative return rather than a marketing position.
Universal Pictures has not yet announced the full The Catch supporting bench, but additional casting is expected over the next 30 days as the production prepares its New York summer shoot. Padilla’s first scenes are scheduled for mid-July, with a planned six-week shooting window that wraps before SNL’s late-September return.
