Sunday, April 1, 2012

April Fools Roundup


Today is April 1, 2012, better known as April Fools Day. It’s the time of the year when ridiculous rumors run rampant. When websites cheekily announce that Robert Downey Junior has been replaced in Iron Man 3 by the more charismatic thespian Peter Dinklage or that a long-lost Francis Ford Coppala sci-fi epic has been discovered in a monastery in Burma.

I thought I would play a little game today. Here are a few recent film headlines, and you decide which are real and which I pulled out of thin air.
  • A Garbage Pail Kids film is about to start production.
  • The producers of Prometheus postulate that their film could outperform James Cameron’s Avatar.
  • There will soon be a film based on the board game Candyland featuring epic Lord of the Rings style battles involving pastries and candies.
  • An erotic fanfiction take on Twilight recently sold for $4 million against 5% of the gross.

Do any of these sound remotely plausible? They should. They are all, in fact, real.

Garbage Pail Kids were weird when I was young, and I have no idea what today’s youth will make of them. Why they want to reboot them is a mystery. I'm hoping for an insane animated feature starring Nervous Rex, the baby who chain smokes and drinks gallons of coffee and soda.

The people who run the official Prometheus website are seriously out of their minds if they think their film will pull in $700 million. I mean, it looks fantastic, I’m super excited for it, and I want everyone to see it, but I am under no illusions to think that it will come close to a mega-blockbuster status. Maybe, just maybe, it will be in the top five grossing films of the year.

Large-scale battles of CGI candy seems too bonkers to wrap my brain around. I wish the producers of that ridiculousness all the best in the world. I might actually pay money to see what they come up with.

Finally, ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ was written by a Twilight fan and was distributed so successfully electronically through e-readers that a bidding war erupted for the film rights. Ten or so studios went nuts over the prospect of filming the story of a 20-something submissive S&M woman and her relationship with a wealthy entrepreneur.

Hollywood can be a strange business some days.

What do you think about these headlines? Do you think any of these are real? Let me know in the comments below and follow me on Twitter!

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