Spanking Shakespeare

No Money for Old Men. Trade Roughage 09/08/08

By Christopher Campbell posted 1 year ago

Bangkok Dangerous opened with only $7.8 million over the weekend, but on the upside it still topped the box office chart and it was still better than Nic Cage’s last non-National Treasure movie, Next. Far more embarrassing is Babylon A.D.’s 58% drop and College’s 55% drop in their second week, as well as Hamlet 2’s 52% drop in its second week in an already disappointing attempt at wide release.
Perhaps the Bard will have better luck with Paramount’s announced adaptation of the young-adult novel Spanking Shakespeare, which actually has even less to do with the playwright than Hamlet 2 does.
The obvious pitch: Braveheart in Egypt. Will Smith is playing Taharqa, a pharaoh who led battles against the eventually successful Assyrian invaders, in The Last Pharaoh. Randall Wallace is currently writing a new draft of the project, and hopefully Smith is hard at work on the “Walk Like an Egyptian”-sampling plot song.
Another soundtrack moment waiting to happen: “Hot for Teacher” playing as Jessica Alba becomes a second-grade math teacher in Marilyn Agrelo’s An Invisible Sign of My Own.
Just as the latest Coen brothers film is about to open, the previous is back in the news. Unfortunately, it’s because Tommy Lee Jones is suing Paramount for more than $10 million, which he claims he’s owed for No Country for Old Men.