Hey, I really appreciate you lettin’ me bring this to you, but who else would have the vision, capiche? I got your next five Oscars just waitin’ to make you some serious bank, are you ready for the love?
I’m tellin’ you, this comic book thing ain’t gonna last, you got me? Spider-Man, Batman, Superman, maybe a Sin City, that Whedon chick’s Wonder Woman, and what’s left? All the A-list heroes will be used up, studios will be lucky to bag the next Catwoman, you see what I’m sayin’?
Turn more old TV shows into movies? There’s a “Starsky and Hutch” or “Bewitched” to stink up your bottom line. Cartoons? Shoot for “Scooby Doo,” you get “Looney Tunes: Back in Action” and then nobody answers your phone calls no more.
Every new book gets optioned before Oprah can finish sayin’ the title. Mythology? Fairy tales? Historical epics? Done, done, done. And there’s only so many old movies we can remake before you start remaking the remakes, and that’s just crazy talk. Probably.
So I say it’s high time to tear through the only untouched source of stories left. Commercials.
No, seriously. Picture it: Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan. Gold, right? They keep meeting but they never hook up until they discover that — get this — they both love Taster’s Choice coffee. Just like those ads everybody went nuts over a million years ago, only this time we add intrigue and ninjas and stuff. And Meg does nude scenes now so you’d have that goin’ on. Get Nora or Penny to direct, pick out your new villa, am I right?
OK, OK, this is the one. Kids biking, surfing, parachuting, fast cars, snowboarding, extreme everything, all to get a can of Mountain Dew. It’s the last one in the world, or an antidote for poisoned orphans or something, and they gotta have it. Get Vin Diesel to play an evil cola manufacturer out to stop them, only he can’t because he hasn’t got the mad skills or the dangerously stoked caffeine levels to keep up. Simon West can direct, or give everybody guns and let John Woo do it. Can’t you see Variety? “Woo does the Dew!” Genius, right?
Edgy, you want edgy. OK, something dark and psychological you can whip out in November for the Academy. There’s this guy, Sonny, he’s a total cereal junkie. Robert Downey, Jr. was born for this. He’s fighting to get the sugar monkey off his back, we’re rootin’ for him, but these little punk kids keep forcing the stuff on him ’til he goes all cuckoo, right? We go into a twisted “Less Than Zero” meets “Master and Commander” thing where he has to journey across the ocean with an insane 3-foot-high captain and his pre-adolescent crew to the remote jungles of the Amazon where King Vitamin and his wise toucan friend help Sonny dry out in their Honeycomb Hideout. Total tear-jerker. Unless you sign De Palma or Tarentino and then he comes back and hunts down all the kids. Very intense, very redemptive.
Or get that Dell kid out of rehab or wherever and do a “Napoleon Dynamite Goes to White Castle” schtick. Give him a stoner friend and a beat up car, maybe Tara Reid, it writes itself! “Dude, Where’s My Dell?” Can you see it?
You want science fiction, I got science fiction. These huge alien frogs, screaming their terrifying battle cry: “Bud!” “Wise!” “Er!” invade and get defeated by a talking gecko and a wise guy chihuahua. Spielberg and Lucas, right? Maybe M. Night?
Look, baby, this is genius. A whole untapped source of concepts with high recognition value. Product placement will be a done deal, which will really help on the back-end financing.
And c’mon, what else you gonna do? Stop ripping off beloved stories for easy plots and develop original, compelling movies that portray the human condition in new, insightful ways to reacquaint us with our common bonds and disparate lives even as they entertain us?
Uh huh. Save it for Sundance, Ingmar. Hey, how about an unstoppable robotic bunny with a cybernetic killing drum, leading hordes of bionic scrubbing bubbles and a zombie army of retired actors in pastel clothing? Ben Affleck’s been looking for something new…