Let’s preface this by saying — we’re not stupid (ok, maybe a little). We know Hollywood studios have been remaking, sequelizing and generally trying their best to bring down cinematic discourse, despite artists working inside the system to change that.
But in 2009, a disturbing level of desperation set in like we’ve never seen before. The act of “branding” seemed to have gotten way out of hand like a wet T-shirt party at an undersexed frat house, and we may have reached the tipping point — Hollywood doesn’t need stinking artists, and they barely need scripts, because anything that is an existing property can become a movie. In the wake of the writer’s strike leaving a bitter taste in the mouths of executives, 2009 has been a period of unprecedented creative bankruptcy as far as what the studios have freely announced is in development. We here at The Playlist have grouped together the most stupefying ideas announced in the trades this year — and no, this isn’t including the raft of unwanted sequels like “Riddick 3” and “Wolverine 2,” but we can depressingly discuss those later.
13. Facebook- Ok, we’ll admit we were way less dubious on this since Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher signed on, under the title “The Social Network.” However, the project apparently originated as a way to use Facebook to market a film, another method of branding that will one day bring us, “Pepsi: The Everlasting Refreshing Adventure.” Once Sorkin came on to write, the popular notion was that this would be a far more interesting film centered around the creation of Facebook. However, look at the facts — this is the same rise-and-fall story you’ve seen countless times before, about a young college guy getting in over his head after creating a bit of twenty-first century tech that everybody wants. This movie happened eight years ago, and it was called “Antitrust” and it sucked a gold ball through a garden hose. And really, in this current economic client, do we need a story about a bunch of privileged and affluent, white “why me?” boys at a top college? In fact, when do we ever need that? Still, if anyone were to pull this off, it’s hopefully Fincher, but we found the script overly-long and a little generic (despite the love it got on The 2009 Black List).
12. MacGruber – SNL films have a dreadful track record and the answer is easy: SNL has largely sucked dick for the better part of a decade aside from the occasionally amusing digital short. Half their tossed-off jokes can’t make it to the finish line of a four minute skit, so how in the name of baby jesus are they supposed to play the length of a feature film? Somehow Lorne Michaels and company keep going, this time convincing backers to greenlight a hard R version of MaGruber, in and of itself a mildly amusing parody of “McGuyver,” a (largely forgotten) ’80s TV show about a resourceful and inventive Boyscout-like man who fought crime with a combination of random items like chewing gum, earwax, tinfoil, number two pencils and good ol’ American know-how. Every MaGruber skit ends with MacGruber and innocent people dying because he takes too long to rescue everybody, too busy discussing what he will invent to save everyone. But here’s one thing Michaels forgot. The MacGruber skits work because by midnight on a Saturday, your audience is already drunk/stoned, and the skit never lasts longer than one minute — it’s pretty hard to fuck up getting a laugh in those circumstances. But just how this is going to amuse a sober, paying audience on a Saturday afternoon remains to be seen. Let’s just hope MacGruber stays true to the skit and dies at the end of the movie so we don’t get a sequel. Update: Ok, we wrote this a month ago. The trailer released yesterday does look pretty amusing. It could be funny. Still, the very idea belongs here.
11. T.J. Hooker – Studios know that a good portion of audiences usually go to the cinema and look at the “Now Playing” board, scrutinizing titles before either picking the one with the most plainly evocative title, or, preferably we’ll guess, selecting the movie with the most name recognition (yeah, we don’t understand those people either). Most people who know anything about “T.J. Hooker” know it was a TV show about cops, and it had a famous lead (William Shatner). Those recollections would result in a pretty low Q-rating, but next fall, studios are banking on someone looks up at generic titles like “The Daughter Of The West,” “The Harrison Protocol” and then “T.J. Hooker” and saying, “Oh, that was a show. I think about a cop. It is a cop movie. TV is soothing.” In fairness, this is a lot like Sony’s “S.W.A.T.,” based on a one-season television show no one remembered aside from an excellent theme song, and Sony spent $80 million on that one. Unless “Hooker” is a star-studded affair, we’re not sure who’s really gonna be lured in by the premise, especially since writers Brent Maddock and S.S. Wilson are writing the film as a comedy (let’s remember that this is the writing duo that brought us the laugh fests “Wild Wild West” and “Ghost Dad”). Okay, so let’s get this straight- Chuck Russell (“The Mask,” “Eraser,” “The Scorpion King”) is directing an adaptation of a television show no one remembers and completely changing the genre? Is the marketing hook of “That show is a movie!” really stronger than whatever they could come up with for an original cop picture?
10.Stretch Armstrong – Unbelievably, this project, which just recently was given the go-ahead by Hasbro with superproducer Brian Grazer at the helm, has been in development for years. A Disney version with Danny DeVito and Jackie Chan was once mooted for an approach in the nineties, but with Hasbro going crazy over “G.I. Joe” and “Transformers,” they’re likely to aim higher. Stretch Armstrong was a toy from the seventies that could stretch to improbable proportions (four feet!), and apparently he fought crime with a stretching dog of some sort. A release date of April 2011 has been staked out despite no director or star aboard. What could this be about? Surely we can see Hasbro’s interest in kickstarting the brand again, but why would people pay ten dollars to see a movie based on a limited-appeal toy like this? Hell, the toy itself only gave you about four minutes of amusement in the 1970s before you threw it aside for something else — why would modern audiences willingly pay for 90 minutes of that?
9. Smurfs -The existence of a peaceful-loving race of blue people fond of nature, fey singalongs and mushrooms (natch) is threatened by a gigantic white man and his cat. No, it’s not a slightly twisted take on “Avatar,” its a live-action adaptation of The Smurfs cartoon and yet another example of an exec who grew up in the ’80s who’s now in power and hoovers so much cocaine, he just doesn’t even know what to do with himself aside from scream maniacally at his hooker friends and boast, “I just greenlit ‘The Smurfs!’… cause I can!” (just wait until the live-action “My Little Pony” is announced). So using presumably a distinctly cheaper version of James Cameron’s motion-capture, this adaptation of the once-beloved cartoon will hopefully be for kids and act as a metaphor of imperialistic pedophiles trying to invade your swimsuit area.
8. Lego – Producers are looking into a live-action/CGI hybrid that brings audiences into a 3D Lego world for this cinematic adventure capitalizing on the popular toys. Hm, 3D Lego movie… yeah, guess what? Legos are three dimensional. You can stay home. Act out the fucking movie. After a while, who really gives a shit about plot or story when you have a internationally successful brand like Lego that essentially sells itself? There will always be kids, therefore an audience will always be in place for a Lego movie, no? Forget a story about nerdy recluse shut-ins who’d rather build and construct things via their imagination instead of interacting with people. Now they’ll probably pick five disparate characters, give them special powers and then set them loose in the gigantic Legoland universe. Its probably just an excuse to print money.
7. Clue – Gore Verbinski is at the controls for this adaptation of the popular board game, where Victorian houseguests must guess who killed Mrs. Peacock, how and where. So, essentially its a whodunit, which makes sense in a movie, consid— oh, wait. It was already a movie? And a funny one? What bugs us about this is that it’s a combination of two things we don’t like — a naked branding opportunity AND a remake of sorts. The original was not an unbeatable movie, but they’re never going to get a cast of that caliber again, a group that included Madeline Kahn, Tim Curry, Christopher Lloyd, Lesley Ann Warren, and Michael McKean, all not only comedians but accomplished actors as well.
6. Baywatch- There was a time in the mid-90’s when the syndicated “Baywatch” was the most popular show in the world. While that time has passed, there’s still some financial merit to that claim, making Baywatch one of the major nostalgic buttons for that generation. But have you watched “Baywatch” lately? Nonexistent plots, cardboard acting, constant slow motion —it’s really an artifact of a time where television went wrong. Jeremy Garelick is writing and directing, of course making a comedy, since the source material is so skimpy that the only thing left to do is shoot fish in a barrel and mock the show’s tone-deaf drama. We’re not exactly sure who is pining to see a big screen version of this franchise, but we can bet it’s probably the same group that keep making the endless “American Pie” sequels feasible. This sounds like the same ingredients — hot young bods, not many clothes, dumb sex jokes — just on a beach. Hooray.
5. Battleship- INT. BATTLESHIP CENTRAL- NIGHT. Alec Baldwin gazes at the computer resonating device. The color swells into a deep red. Music swells in the background, as Baldwin clenches his fist. “You sank my goddamned battleship, you bastards…” Is this what we have to look forward to in the future? The board game revolving around naval combat and picking which peg is in which hole while keeping your own pegs safe is set to become a major blockbuster courtesy of director Peter Berg. We’re not sure what to say about this — apparently the name Battleship brings them out in droves, otherwise, why else do a naval battle movie? Really, Berg and co., if you made a generic naval attack movie with two generals fighting, and five varied ships for each of them, including a fearsome BATTLESHIP, would anyone really sue? The project only became more mentally-challenged-sounding when it was revealed aliens would be involved which was only a step above announcing that Count Chocula was set to be the picture’s secret antagonist.
4. Monopoly- Ridley Scott has no shortage of films in development, so we may have dodged a bullet with his batshit insane bizarro-futuristic imagining of the classic board game that tears families and loved ones apart (if it doesn’t bore them to death after four hours of playing the game first). Hasbro CEO Brian Goldner claims the movie will be “topical” and deal with the housing crisis, which sounds hysterical. Can you imagine a trailer with sweeping Ridley Scott vistas, a family being foreclosed, weeping openly, shouting, “Who did this to us?” Followed by a dealer intoning, “It was Mister Moneybags (played by Russell Crowe).” Cut to black — THIS SUMMER… DO NOT PASS GO. How do you take this seriously, especially if, with Scott aboard, you go for epic bombast? Is there going to be ANY levity when someone is reduced to only owning hotels on Mediterranean Avenue? Is someone going to end the movie completely broke (aside from an audience who empties their wallets to see this)? Who plays the Shoe? There’s really no movie in this. Oh wait, they decided to add some shitty, brain-dead “Alice In Wonderland” analogy to it and even the geek bloggers balked. Go straight to jail?
3. View-Master – In 1939, back when televisions weren’t a household item, kids needed to amuse themselves somehow. When stickball, craps, and looking up your sister’s friend’s skirt wasn’t doing it, Fisher Price filled a niche by introducing the View-Master, a small toy that you could view magnified slides in. For people who liked flipbooks, but wished they were heavier and more cumbersome, the View-Master was the toy that defined a generation. And by generation we mean a handful of really lame children in the 1940s. “Transformers” screenwriters Alex Kurtzman and Robero Orci stunned the film world this year by announcing the completely useless toy was to be the basis for a new film, one that would be “like the old ’80s Amblin movies: “Goonies,” “Young Sherlock”… In that vein,” which is what they offhandedly remarked about the project, sounding a lot like people just reaching for desperate ideas. The View-Master is a device for looking at shit — Kurtzman and Orci are somehow banking on the View-Master being a recognizable enough name that people won’t realize this is tantamount to financing “Slide Show: The Movie.”
2. Candyland- Okay, have you ever played Candyland? Shit’s the easiest, most pointless game ever invented. Once you flip to a color, you have to move to that spot. The first person to the candy at the end of the path wins. Essentially, its a Pedophile’s Guidebook To Seducing Children. We don’t really care for movies that celebrate the reward of financial success instead of truth, justice and whatever else enriches your life, but how do you market a movie where the goal of the characters is to score a massive amount of candy? Advocates against childhood obesity will be all over this thing. What makes anyone think director Kevin Lima (“Enchanted”) is going to do anything other than completely rip off the “Willy Wonka” movies? We do hope they just go full-out creepy with this, and at the end of the path is a Candyland ruled by a naked Harvey Keitel.
1. Asteroids- Ok, no arguing in the comments section because this is kinda indisputable — there has never been a good movie based on a video game. Not once. And they’ve done all the big ones already, so there’s no reason we can’t be done with this genre. Oh, but wait — one of the most plotless games in existence is getting a go at the big screen. Quoth producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura (the genius behind “G.I. Joe”) — “I was attracted to ‘Asteroids,’ plain and simple, because I think what it tells you is that there’s going to be this big thing in space.” That di Bonaventura, always a thinker. This property, set to be a space adventure involving two brothers going on some completely generic space adventure, now has what di Bonaventura claims is a “deep mythology.” Unbelievable. It’s very much like adapting Pong, which we expect to see soon anyway — you might as well adapt skee ball. How about “Pick-Up Sticks” starring Vince Vaughn and a giant hand?
God, have mercy on us if most of these films actually make it to the big-screen and hopefully they were nothing more than slow days for the trades who called up producers and plead, “OK, give me something.”— Jared Weiss and Gabe Toro.