Movies
Melissa McCarthy Will Star in R-Rated Puppet Thriller ‘The Happytime Murders’
We’ve been talking about director Brian Henson’s puppet thriller The Happytime Murders since way back in 2012, but it looks like the long-gestating project is finally on the fast track.
STX Entertainment just announced today that Melissa McCarthy (Ghostbusters) will both star in and produce the film, which she describes as her own personal fever dream come to life.
The dark comedy is set in the underbelly of Los Angeles where puppets and humans coexist. Two clashing detectives, one human and one puppet, are forced to work together to try and solve who is brutally murdering the former cast of “The Happytime Gang,” a beloved puppet show.
McCarthy said in a statement:
When a really good script combines puppet strippers, Los Angeles’ underbelly and comedy, it’s like my fever dream has finally come true.
The film is set to begin production this August and will be produced by The Jim Henson Company’s Henson Alternative banner, On The Day Productions, and STXfilms with producers Brian Henson, Jeffrey Hayes, Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone. Lisa Henson and John W. Hyde will executive produce. The story is by Todd Berger & Dee Robertson; the screenplay is by Todd Berger with revisions by Erich & Jon Hoeber; further revisions by McCarthy.
Universal has been having a hell of a time getting their Universal Monsters brand back on a better path in the wake of the Dark Universe collapsing, with four movies thus far released in the years since The Mummy attempted to get that interconnected universe off the ground.
First was Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, to date the only post-Mummy hit for the Universal Monsters, followed by The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Renfield, and now Abigail. The latter three films have attempted to bring Dracula back to the screen in fresh ways, but both Demeter and Renfield severely underperformed at the box office. And while Abigail is a far better vampire movie than those two, it’s unfortunately also struggling to turn a profit.
Where does the Universal Monsters brand go from here? The good news is that Universal and Blumhouse have once again enlisted the help of Leigh Whannell for their upcoming Wolf Man reboot, which is howling its way into theaters in January 2025. This is good news, of course, because Whannell’s Invisible Man was the best – and certainly most profitable – of the post-Dark Universe movies that Universal has been able to conjure up. The film ended its worldwide run with $144 million back in 2020, a massive win considering the $7 million budget.
Given the film was such a success, you may wondering why The Invisible Man 2 hasn’t come along in these past four years. But the wait for that sequel may be coming to an end.
Speaking with the Happy Sad Confused podcast this week, The Invisible Man star Elisabeth Moss notes that she feels “very good” about the sequel’s development at this point in time.
“Blumhouse and my production company [Love & Squalor Pictures]… we are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” Moss updates this week. “And I feel very good about it.”
She adds, “We are very much intent on continuing that story.”
At the end of the 2020 movie, Elisabeth Moss’s heroine Cecilia Kass uses her stalker’s high-tech invisibility suit to kill him, now in possession of the technology that ruined her life.
Stay tuned for more on The Invisible Man 2 as we learn it.
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