Hollywood frequently gets accused of relying too much on sequels, remakes, and adaptations instead of coming up with new ideas, because in general Hollywood is terrible at originality. As if in effort to prove that very point, Tinseltown has recently paid real, actual dollars for the privilege of developing razor-thin concepts and abstract ideas into major motion pictures rather than have to come up with anything on their own.
The website deviantART is devoted to independent artists and crude illustrations of various fictional characters having sex. Somewhere in the vast middle ground separating those two categories, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson stumbled upon this shreddingly bitchin' picture of a teddy bear called "Sweet Halloween Dreams," because the Rock is ever-vigilant in his quest to never, ever stop doing things:
begemott.deviantART.com
For example, he was presumably lifting weights and rehearsing Hercules dialogue while looking at this picture.
Johnson's assistant got in touch with New Line Cinema, who immediately bought the film rights to the drawing. That's correct -- the film rights to a drawing. It is unclear whether the Rock will be playing the teddy bear, the scowling fear golem, or the little girl, or if he'll just play all three roles like Eddie Murphy.
The trailer for the video game Dead Island, a zombie-bludgeoning festival set at a tropical resort, made a pretty big splash on the Internet when it debuted in 2011. The game itself turned out to be a musty corpse fart, but the trailer logged enough views on YouTube to gain the attention of Lionsgate, who bought the film rights. To the trailer.
That's right: Before the game was even released, Lionsgate decided they wanted to turn that dazzling three-minute parade of middle-of-the-road graphics into a full-length motion picture, because it was "sophisticated, edgy, and a true elevation of a genre we know and love." To recap, the trailer is a girl getting bit by zombies and then thrown out of a window played in reverse to a quiet orchestral piece.
Save your 10 bucks and just watch this live-action remake. You're welcome.
Don't get us wrong, the trailer is stupidly good. But you need a bit more than that to sustain an entire movie.
Or you could just make a movie about a series of photos of a frowning cat.
mediapickle.me
"Ugh, Tuesdays. I think I'll eat all of Joe's baked ziti."
Earlier this year, Broken Road, the production company responsible for the unutterable demon curses Here Comes the Boom and Jack and Jill, decided to buy the film rights to the Grumpy Cat meme, because they apparently wanted to challenge themselves to make an even shittier movie. The idea is to make a "Garfield style" comedy starring Grumpy Cat, but to make it just different enough from the two existing Garfield movies so that Jim Davis, creator of the "hilarious" Garfield comic strip, does not sue them into a pile of jokeless dust.
20th Century Fox recently decided to purchase the rights to three wedding-centered websites and develop them into a trilogy of films, because apparently every decision at Fox is handled by a team of executives flinging a Magic 8 Ball at each other with jai alai cestas.
Jesus Abizanda
Inside the production meeting for the X-Men franchise.
Websites TheKnot.com, TheBump.com, and TheNest.com were all sold off to Fox, which intends to make them into corresponding films about marriage, pregnancy, and raising children, three things you may recognize as being the subject of countless movies over the past eight decades. They've nailed down one of the writers from Gossip Girl to bring the incredible story of these advice blogs to the big screen, so there's no possible way this movie will be a smoldering log of manatee shit.
Evan V. Symon
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