Kids these days. Well, more specifically, kid stars these days. Just when you think we've gotten away with making people famous way, way too early, allowing the Jodie Fosters and Natalie Portmans of the world to grow up just fine, you get a Lindsay Lohan or Corey Haim or Amanda Bynes to break your heart all over again. And the crazy thing is, we keep making more of these kid stars. You'd think they might be able to make a system like the way they have stunt bears-- keep a few child stars in rotation to be lent out to studios for a few days for a film, then allow them to go back to normal lives that might give them a chance of growing up OK.
Without that system in place, though, the kid stars keep entering the mill, and the latest to join the fray is Ed Oxenbould, who will play no less than the title role in Alexander And The Terrible, Horrible, No-Good Very-Bad Day (via Deadline). That book by Judith Viorst and its mouthful of a title have been children's literature classics for decades since its publication in 1972, and Hollywood has been attempting to make it their own for seemingly just as long. Not long after we suggested Spike Jonze should make it, The Kids Are All Right director Lisa Cholodenko signed on to adapt Alexander for Fox, who had had the rights for years and were oh-so-slowly searching for a director. A year later Steve Carell signed on, but after that it fell victim to some fairly typical Hollywood shenanigans-- Fox lost interest, gave up the rights, Disney picked them up, then Cholodenko bailed, replaced by Cedar Rapids and Youth in Revolt helmer Miguel Arteta.
Miraculously, Steve Carell hung on through all that chaos, and he's now joined by Jennifer Garner, presumably playing the mom who reassures Alexander that everybody has bad days, even people in Australia. As it turns out, Oxenbould ought to be pretty familiar with that country where Alexander swears he'll move after a bad day like this one-- his main credit is on the Australian teen soap Puberty Blues, in which he plays the irritating younger brother of lead character Debbie, naturally. You can spot him around the 2:30 mark in this full episode below, complaining about a rash on his legs. Sounds like a perfectly Alexander-like complaint, actually.
