Regular House M.D. watchers may remember an episode from season five guest starring Judy Greer as a nurse at a nursing home who believes that the resident cat has the ability to predict when people will die. Advertised as "based on true events" it was all fairly drawn out and eventually revealed that the cat just had an affinity for heating blankets. But isn't just like a movie studio to take an idea and beat it mercifully into the ground?
Variety reports that a book about the very same cat has been optioned for a film treatment. Based on the book Making The Rounds With Oscar: The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Cat by David Dosa, the story will be adapted by writers Stephen Lindsey and Luis Ugaz. The story of Oscar The Cat was first published in a 2007 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, and it is suggested by some that the feline can detect odors given off by dying cells.
The article doesn't say anything about the tone that the film will take, but I can guarantee that it will go one of two ways: Patch Adams or Paranormal Activity. The episode of House was able to use the story because the cat wasn't the main focus, rather it was the disease plaguing Greer's character. Either this will be a sappy story about families coming to terms with the death of their grandfather as predicted by a cat or someone is going to whip out a Ouija Board at some point. I'd rather have neither.
