Last week, while I was still exhausted from my first real SXSW experience, news broke out that actor/writer Jason Segel (of TV’s Freaks and Geeks and How I Met Your Mother and the upcoming movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall) is planning a new Muppet movie. Though the announcement likely figured into my subsequent quick recovery, I wasn’t in good enough health to write about it at the time. Fortunately, now there’s more details, courtesy of MTV Movies Blog, and I’m even more giddy than before. As I figured, Segel is looking to the original Muppet flicks, specifically The Muppet Movie, The Great Muppet Caper and The Muppets Take Manhattan, which were more centered on the Muppets themselves (rather than having them dropped into pre-written classics like A Christmas Carol and Treasure Island) as they simply set out to put on a show. And as I hoped for, Segel, who is already writing the script with his Marshall co-writer/director Nick Stoller, says he’s planning for a great deal of cameos, particularly from those actors we’d all assume would be involved.
Segel revealed plans to similarly enlist big-name cameos for the flick; in fact, he’s already approached several members of the Judd Apatow stable that includes Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Kristen Wiig and Paul Rudd. “All of our friends that I’ve brought it up to are pretty excited by the prospect of it. Everyone loves the Muppets; they’ve got a warm place in most people’s hearts,” he explained. “We want a lot of cameos. You look back at Charles Grodin, Charles Durning, there were just such great performances in those movies.”
