While the concept of “Will they?/Won’t they?” is normally reserved for two characters who may or may not be on the cusp of romantic entanglement, the past two months have seen it applied to the tongue-in-cheek Lifetime movie A Deadly Adoption from former Saturday Night Live veterans Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig. And hey, it looks like it’s real after all! And it’s coming later this month!
While all official announcements have apparently been avoided by Lifetime, a reporter for THR snapped a pic of the film’s mostly-cheesy-but-sorta-legitimate poster hanging off the side of a building.
Now, you may notice that the date on the bottom of the poster is wrong, as June 20, 2015 is actually a Saturday and not a Sunday. This typo initially had us once again questioning whether or not this movie really existed, and if the poster itself was part of the overall prank. But no, THR’s sources say that the screw-up isn’t indicative of network trolling and that the film will indeed debut on Lifetime on Saturday, June 20.
So we’re less than three weeks away and the only promotion has been a single poster with a flub on it. There’s nothing about it on Lifetime’s website, and there obviously hasn’t been a trailer or teaser for it yet. One has to wonder if enough people will even know about this movie to bring in enough viewers to justify all of this.
A Deadly Adoption was first announced back on April 1 as a “leaked” story about the comic actors having already filmed the super-secret project, so it’s easy to see why it was initially viewed as a joke. Ferrell came out a day later with a statement saying that because the secrecy of the project was spoiled, they were just going to scrap the entire thing. Multiple outlets then came out and said that Ferrell’s statement was garbage and that Lifetime was still moving forward with it. Until this thing actually airs, I’m still going to be half-skeptical.
The film, written by Spoils of Babylon scribe Andrew Steele, is said to be a winking take on the network’s hyper-dramatic fare. In it, Ferrell and Wiig will play a successful couple who allow a pregnant woman (90210’s Jessica Lowndes) to live with them with an end goal of adopting her baby as their own. As things usually don’t pan out properly for the network’s main characters, everything goes wrong here as well.
A Deadly Adoption will mark the 25th anniversary of Lifetime, which has recently started branching out with its original programming with shows about Lizzie Borden and The Clan of the Cave Bear. One would hope that the success of A Deadly Adoption would allow for similar projects in the future, but people probably need to know about it first. So don't forget to tune in on Saturday, June 20.
