Brian Henson, son of the legendary Muppet master Jim Henson, spoke to Vulture and dropped some details on some of the forthcoming projects at the Jim Henson Company.
The most high profile project is last year’s Black List winning “Muppet Man,” a biopic about Brian’s father Jim. The ambitious script sidesteps the notions of the genre by adding hallucinations and dream sequences featuring the Muppet characters, suggesting a sideways goal of making a new Muppet movie by inserting them into the moribund celebrity biopic genre. The script was optioned by JHC, but little seems to have happened since. “I can’t really comment in detail on that. There was a spec script and we optioned it, but while discussions are going on it is not active right now,” Brian Henson says. Bummer. It sounds like a great script and we hope they figure out a way to get it going soon.
Also coming from the famed Muppet studio is an R-rated puppet movie called “The Happytime Murders.” As Henson describes it, the film centers on “a puppet private eye in Hollywood in a world in which puppets are a minority population and treated badly. It’s a gritty crime thriller and a satire of the genre and a balls-out comedy. And it’ll be rated R.” It’s apparently “really far along in development,” though Henson declined the name the studio that’s currently involved. So it’s like a hilarious version of “Sin City” with puppets perhaps? Sounds pretty awesome.
