Disney has regularly refused to give up the dream of producing the long in-development film Bob The Musical - which has been in the works for a full decade - and today they've made yet another big effort towards getting the job done. Producer/writer Allan Loeb has been hired by the studio to write the pen the latest version of the script, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The story centers on an ordinary guy named Bob who is living an ordinary life right up until he suffers a sudden head injury. When he awakens he discovers that he can hear "the inner songs of everyone’s heart" and watches as the whole world is turned into a giant musical. Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, who have earned an incredible amount of acclaim for their work on the music of the animated film Frozen, have been hired to work on Bob The Musical's music and lyrics.
This is just the latest move for a project that has been stuck in development hell for years and years. First picked up by the studio all the way back in 2004, the film has had a number of filmmakers attached to helm, including Adam Shankman and the duo Phil Lord and Chris Miller, but it's never been able to gain the traction necessary to continue the pre-production phase and get the script in front of cameras. Perhaps this new round of revisions will be exactly what the movie needs to get going.
Loeb's background isn't exactly filled with Disney-esque titles. His first produced script was the 2007 Susanne Bier drama Things We Lost in the Fire, but he has experimented with a number of different genres since, working on the scripts for movies like Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, The Switch, The Dilemma, Just Go With It. His last film, the spy comedy So Undercover starring Miley Cyrus, came out in 2012, but he has a number of in-development screenplays, including the earthquake thriller San Andreas 3D, the gay parenting dramedy Patrik: Age 1.5, and the drama The Only Living Boy In New York.
Loeb does have some musical experience, having previously written the adaptation of the Broadway musical Rock of Ages for director Adam Shankman's 2012 film. While I found the movie to be marginally tolerable, most critics were less kind.
In regards to Bob The Musical, I must admit that the premise sounds very familiar. Fans of the television series Scrubs will remember that there was an entire episode that followed a patient who was weirdly hearing everyone around her singing. It turned out that she was suffering the effects of an aneurysm in her temporal lobe, but something tells me that the Disney version of the story won't have that kind of medical diagnosis. You can watch the best parts of the episode - and by that I mean all the musical numbers - below:
