I don't believe I've seen a clearer sign of the impending cinematic apocalypse than the news earlier this week that Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, the writing duo who gave us the semi-nightmarish script for Star Trek and the entirely nightmarish script for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, are in discussions to help produce a movie based on the old Fisher-Price View-Master toy. I promise that I am not making this up.
Evidently it's no longer enough that we endure a film based on every 1970s action figure (G.I. Joe opens next month!) and video game ("Asteroids" was just the subject of a four-studio bidding war, despite the facts that it has no characters or plot and it was last played ten years before anyone in the movie's target audience was born). Now, we're also expected to flock to theaters to see a film based on an entirely inanimate, never particularly beloved slide-viewer for kids.
On the upside, this suggests a rich market for a script I've been working on called Silly Putty, in which a smooth, candy-colored egg lands on Earth and disgorges a malevolent flesh-colored goo capable of making a perfect copy of any human being it presses itself against. What? Spike Jonze has already secured the rights? Crap. Guess it's time to dust off that Slinky screenplay instead...
--Christopher Orr