People have bad ideas sometimes. Those people can include politicians, parents, prepubescent teens, and more often than not, studio executives. We live in an age where movies like Norbit, Meet the Spartans, and Beverly Hills Chihuahua have all been greenlit, written, directed, and released by actual real-life people. Not monkeys or autistic cats or manatees.
One of those bad ideas is a live-action/animation hybrid adaptation of Smurfs, to be released by Sony in December of next year. Variety is reporting that this bad idea has just picked up a bad-idea-friendly director by the name of Raja Gosnell, who’s done plenty of work on bad idea films like Beverly Hills Chihuahua and Home Alone 3. Gosnell will bring to life a script written by Shrek 2 scribe David N. Weiss.
Now the problem with a Smurfs movie isn’t that the material is sacred (although I must say that I’m guilty of owning Smurfs sheets from my childhood). It’s the fact that the material is ridiculously lame; so ridiculous in fact that it’s impossible to come up with a simile or metaphor for just how lame it is. With kids getting the chance to check out movies like Up and Where The Wild Things Are this year, it’s incredible to imagine that they’d be interested in tired characters like these, especially if they’re forcibly mashed together with live action actors. Now that’s just a bad idea.
