“If they had to do it all over again, would DreamWorks co-founder Steven Spielberg and his partner Stacey Snider have left their lucrative deal at Paramount Pictures, where their slate of films had thrived, if they had foreseen the worsening financial environment?” According to Anne Thompson, DreamWorks is having a lot of trouble raising money during the credit crunch, and Spielberg and Snider may have to settle on a smaller business plan. On her blog, Thompson simplifies things: “But it’s Steven Spielberg! It doesn’t matter. The banks aren’t lending to anybody. It’s sheer bad luck.”
Ari Folman is following up his winning animated doc Waltz With Bashirwith an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s sci-fi short story The Futurological Congress, which will begin as live-action then transition to animation. “Think of your favorite young actress. She’ll appear that way at the beginning, and then as the film goes on, she’ll be drawn like she’s 50,” Folman explains. So, like Kate Winslet in The Reader, but as a cartoon rather than with distracting aging makeup.
Barry Sonnenfeld will direct another sci-fi action comedy called The How-To Guide for Saving the World, which sounds like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy if Arthur and Ford had been able to use their book to twart the Vogon’s demolishon of Earth.
Billy Ray will direct his own adaptation of the supernatural novel Conjure Wife, which has been filmed three times previously. The premise sounds like Bewitched as a horror film.
Adam Shankman, who raised his comedy rep recently with Prop 8: The Musical (and may lower it again now with Bedtime Stories), has added another musical and another f/x extravanza to his pipeline. The former is the high-concept Bob the Musical; the latter is the long-in-works revival of Sinbad.
Not that adults can’t already appreciate Muppet movies enough as they are, but The Jim Henson Co. has a new film in the works that will primarily be for grown-ups. Described as being a little Avenue Q mixed with a little L.A. Confidential and Pulp Fiction, the movie will be set in a world where humans and puppets co-exist (umm, like any other Muppet movie, uh huh), in which the latter are considered second-class citizens (still kind of like any other Muppet movie) and become victim to a series of murders (ok, there’s the adult part). Titled The Happyland Murders, this seemingly Muppets version of Who Framed Roger Rabbit will be directed by Brian Henson (The Muppet Christmas Carol).
This should be the year to debut hot political films, not announce them, but Fox Searchlight has reportedly acquired the rights to Allen Raymond’s memoir How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative, which has been adapted and will be directed by Billy Ray (Shattered Glass).
The boys of Peter Billingsley’s Couples Retreat have now been assigned wives: Jason Bateman gets Kristen Bell; Vince Vaughn gets Malin Ackerman; and Jon Favreau somehow gets Kristin Davis. The plot has all these pairings headed to a tropical island in order to save their marriages. There should really be an official genre called Romantic Fantasy Comedy for this one to be classified as.
In more typical romantic comedy genre news, Amy Adams will star in Leap Yearas an uptight woman who wants to follow Irish tradition and propose to her boyfriend on February 29. The script, from the writers of Made of Honor, is described as being like It Happened One Night. I’m sure.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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