There are so many pictures of Ben Affleck going to Dunkin’. Or coming from Dunkin’. Or just, like, walking around with a cup of coffee from Dunkin’. Go Google it sometime, preferably after you read this entire post — which also contains Dunkin’-related pictures of Ben Affleck — all the way to the bottom. A reasonable argument can be made, just based on the amount of time he devotes to it, that going to Dunkin’ is his favorite thing in the world to do. That or making movies. Which gets me to the point I wanted to make.
Why hasn’t Ben Affleck been in a Dunkin’-related movie yet? It seems so obvious. He should have come to them with an idea by now. Or they should have come to him with an idea. This all seems so obvious that it’s a little upsetting it hasn’t happened yet once you put about 30 seconds of thought into it. Luckily, kind of, I have some ideas here. Not great ideas, sure, fine. But pretty okay ones. Places to start from. Things to get the bagel rolling, if you will… which you probably should not based on that awful phrasing alone. None of this will stop me.
What I’ve done here is fire off six ideas, separated into the three categories of films he is most often associated with: Tearjerker/awards-y movies, action/shoot-em-ups, and rom-coms. There are two important things to know here:
- You might notice a theme or two develop as you read through these
- I am an idiot
Here we go.
Tearjerker/Awards-y Movies
Cruller’s Dozen
Lifelong Boston resident Lance Cruller is tired of watching his old neighborhood go to hell. Drugs, crime, kids getting sucked into the kind of life that ends with jail or a young corpse, the whole thing. Most of his friends have given up and moved out to the suburbs. That’s not Lance’s style, though. Lance is a fighter. And he has an idea. He scrounges together enough money to open a Dunkin franchise right there on the toughest corner in the area. He staffs it with 12 local kids, trying to get them off the street, showing them the value of hard work, coming in to bake donuts every morning at 4am.
It’s a tough sell at first, and things get a little dicey when one of his favorite kids — little Mikey O’Hurley — quits and shows up two weeks later in a ski mask with intentions on walking out with the cash in the register, but Lance blasts everyone with a combination of tough love and grit and turns the location into a safe haven for anyone who needs one. As the movie ends, we see Lance and Mikey standing on a corner a few blocks away and we zoom out to reveal that Mikey has gotten back on track and is opening his own Dunkin franchise.
Fresh Start
Rebuilding your life from scratch is never easy, but that’s exactly what Richie “Cream” Sugarman is trying to do. Ten years earlier, the lifelong Boston resident found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time after a Red Sox game and ended up getting sent to prison when he was mistakenly identified by witnesses as the perpetrator of an assault he was trying to stop. Now he’s out, and his options are limited, and the whole world around him has changed. What the hell is TikTok anyway?
But he still has friends. One of them manages a Dunkin in the old neighborhood and he hooks Cream up with a job. It’s nothing glamorous. He’s in there every day before sunrise to get the donuts started and the coffee brewing. But it gives him purpose. He starts piecing things together. He signs up for business classes at night. He scrapes together some money with the dreams of opening his own franchise one day. But things are hard when you’re an ex-con, and the bank refuses to give him the loan he needs to get started. His dreams are dashed.
Until. The community comes together. The customers he greets every day start a fundraiser. His story spreads throughout Boston. The people who were actually responsible for the assault come forward and attempt to clear his name. Flash forward 18 months and Cream Sugarman is mopping up the Dunkin he runs and his attorney rushes in to tell him his record has been cleared. The Dropkick Murphys take us into the credits.
Action/Shoot-Em-Up Movies
White Powder
Drug smugglers from South America have gotten their hands on a submarine. Every week, they fill it with product and send it to the Bahamas, where corrupt officials of a budget cruise line have agreed to meet them for a handoff, with the drugs loaded into an airtight container attached to the bottom of the boat. Law enforcement officials know something is up, but they haven’t pieced together the whole plan. They need a man on the inside. They need eyes on the ground.
Enter FBI agent Bucky Glazer. The lifelong Boston resident is sent down to Paradise Island with two directives:
- Open and run a Dunkin location at the Atlantis Hotel on Paradise Island as a cover operation
- Poke around the docks and listen to the customers as they chat over coffee and breakfast to see if he can get to the bottom of it
And it all works. He figures out the whole plan. A bust is scheduled to go down at midnight on a Saturday night, right when the submarine is scheduled to slide up to the cruise ship. But there’s a problem. A storm is coming through the Florida port where Bucky’s team is supposed to leave from. They won’t make it. The FBI wants to reschedule but Bucky Glazer knows this is their best shot. He’s going to go it alone. And now an even bigger storm is rolling through the Bahamas. Things are windy and wild and dangerous. Just the way Bucky likes them.
Time to put on a pot of coffee.
Coolatta
Legendary hitman and lifelong Boston resident Axel Coolatta is out of the game. He just wants a peaceful retirement with his new wife. A normal life, whatever that is. They develop a routine that starts with coffee and blueberry muffins every Sunday morning at their local Dunkin. It’s nice.
But then tragedy strikes. His wife gets sick and passes away. He keeps up the Sunday tradition as a way to remember her. It’s tough but he’s getting by. One Sunday morning, he gets into an argument with some street toughs at a gas station. They want to buy his car, he’s not selling, they feel disrespected. They follow him and see he goes into the Dunkin and seems to know everyone. He looks happy. They plot their revenge and come back that night and firebomb the place with Molotov cocktails.
That’s it. Now Axel is mad. They took away the one thing he had left to remember his wife. He’s going back to his old ways to hunt them down and make them pay, which becomes more complicated when he discovers the head street tough is related to the head of the Boston crime family he used to work f-…
Hmm. It appears this one is just John Wick with a Dunkin in place of the dog. Still. Think about it.
Rom-coms
Frosted
Single father Jake Eclair, a lifelong Boston resident, has a routine: Every morning, after dropping his daughter off at school, he stops to grab a coffee at the Dunkin next door. Not a long stop. Sometimes he just grabs it to go on the way to work. But every day he’s there, he runs into another parent from the school, a single mother named Sarah. They start chatting. They bond over the struggles of raising a child alone. They hit it off a little bit.
One icy winter day, the owner of the franchise — a sweet old man who has been there since 1987 — tells them he’s planning to retire. He was going to turn it over to his son, but the son just announced plans to move to Florida. And the location is in a tough part of town, so the national headquarters is thinking about shutting it down. Jake and Sarah are devastated. This is their spot. Something needs to happen.
So they sit there that morning sipping their coffees (cream for him, black for her) and they come up with a crazy idea: What if… what if they take over the franchise? Sure, they don’t know anything about running a fast-food restaurant. Jake can’t even make coffee right, which is explained via Act I montage and the reason he started stopping there in the first place. But hey, you only live once, right? And it’s an excuse to spend some time together. It might work. It could work. They’ll just need to get up early and roll up their sleeves and make it happen.
Jelly in Paris
What we have here:
- An audacious plan by the new CEO of Dunkin to open a franchise in Paris
- The CEO calls in Jelly Fillman, a lifelong Boston resident whose specialty is opening new stores in difficult locations, flying in to get them off the ground then returning home until his next assignment, which is a life he loves but has prevented him from settling down
- The locals resist everything about it, this American coming in with his mass-produced pastries in Paris, of all places, with the charge being led by Sophie, the woman who runs the little bakery across the street
- Etc. etc. etc. they kiss at the Eiffel Tower
You know how this one goes.