An Epic For Our Age

Via EW...

The whole "race to the bottom" story of studios greenlighting a "franchise movie" based on ANYTHING seems to have cooled down a bit, as high-profile "what, really?" projects like Monopoly and Stretch Armstrong stalled out, but a few of the early pickups from the initial feeding-frenzy are still en-route; and one of them is getting closer to reality... "CANDY LAND: THE MOVIE."

I'm reasonably certain most everyone played this at one point, right? It's basically a "roll the dice and move" game for pre-literate children, so drawing random color-cards replaced a dice or number-wheel.

What's ironic is that it probably lends itself more readily to a movie than, say, "Battleship" because there was a nominal narrative and set of characters attached to hold the kiddie's interest. So very, very soon we may learn which actors-in-need-of-work will be vying for such choice roles as King Kandy (tailor-made for aging, retirement-minded British thespians!) Queen Frostine ("hottie" TV actresses making the jump to features?) and mincing, vaugely-"fey" villain Lord Licorice (Mr. Depp? Mr. Cage? Start your engines.)

The "big story," of course, is this delightful quote offered to EW by Glenn Berger, one of the films two (!!!) writers, about their ambitious vision for the project:

“We envision it as Lord of The Rings, but set in a world of candy.”

And elaborating...

“We don’t see it as a movie based on a board game, although it has characters from that world and takes the idea of people finding themselves in a world that happens to be made entirely of candy where there are huge battles going on,” Berger says. “We are going for real comedy, real action, and real emotions at stake.”

...

Y'know what? Fuck it. Fuck being snarky. I want this movie to come out NOW. I want to see the Battle of Pelennor Fields being fought by gingerbread men with giant-ass peppermint sticks and lollipops. I want to see $200 Million worth of CGI used to render a giant fortress made of Licorice. I want to see Mr. Mint wailing on dudes with his axe. I want to see Plumpy getting the ever-living shit beaten out of him - don't care what context.