Last Friday, Hollywood Reporter broke the news that Fox will bring the comic strip Marmaduke to the big screen. One the one hand, this is baffling. The comic, a series of crudely rendered half-jokes, makes very little sense, and has no story whatsoever. The fact that Marmaduke is a mischievous great dane barely even qualifies as a premise. On the other hand, studios have sunk massive amounts of money into comic strip movies like Garfield and Dennis the Menace, and money-making dog movies like Marley & Me, which has earned $166 million worldwide since its Christmas ‘08 release.

So Marmaduke might make economic sense, but it makes little sense otherwise. The green-lighting of this project is a peek into the bizarre minds of studio executives. If movies like Wall-E and the Harry Potter series bring home the bacon and earn critical acclaim, why empty the coffers for family tent-pole movies based on the crappiest of source material available? I have a theory. Just as Zack Snyder was goaded on by the allegedly “unfilmable” quality of the Watchmen graphic novel, the executives at Fox must see the production of a Marmaduke film as an act of artistic defiance. Let’s turn and unreadable comic into an unwatchable movie, they say, and laugh all the way to the bank when it destroys the competition at the box office!

In that vein, I challenge the major studios to make the following comic strips into movies, just to see if people will pay to see the resulting crap. If they should choose to accept this challenge, may God help us all.

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