Movies
New Line Picks Up ‘The Watching Hour’ Spec
This past Friday, New Line – the studio once beaten into submission by polar bears – picked up a spec script entitled The Watching Hour, written by Carey and Shane Van Dyke. The grandsons of legendary comedian Dick Van Dyke appear to have spent a good chunk of their careers writing and acting in Asylum films.
Their script is described as a home invasion scenario with aliens, which immediately brings to mind A) Signs and B) Dark Skies. The latter is an unproduced treatment written by Steven Spielberg in between his friendlier extraterrestrial films, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and E.T.. Deciding he only wanted to produce, he handed it over to John Sayles to tweak and direct. Shortly thereafter, it was completely abandoned when Spielberg wrote a kinder alien character into the film who befriended the terrorized family’s son and, well, many people’s childhoods were forever changed.
Here’s hoping this spec script is less like Signs and more like… anything but Signs.
Described as “Ted meets ET,” David Mikalson’s raunchy comedy Goblin is being brought to life over at A24, and Will Forte (“The Four Seasons”) is now in talks to star.
Deadline first reported the news this afternoon.
Kenneth Branagh has been cast to voice the titular Goblin in the upcoming A24 movie, with the character said to be “green-colored” as well as “anatomically correct.”
Skyler Gisondo (Superman) is reportedly playing the Goblin’s human best friend.
The mysterious project sounds a bit like films including A Gnome Named Gnorm and more recently, Frankie Freako, though it’s important to note that it’s not billed as a horror movie.
Deadline details, “After [Mikalson] hatched the idea to make an outrageous buddy comedy about a goblin, using a practical puppet and operating outside the Hollywood system, his script quickly got him a rep team. While others might have eyed the raunchy comedy as a writing sample or planned to wait to see the micro-budget version Mikalson has been directing in Kentucky, A24 jumped all over it. The hot indie essentially has agreed to finance a full feature.”
“There was a lot of interest, but A24 came with what Mikalson really wanted, after spending all his money crafting the puppet title character: they acquired the movie and agreed to let him make it with a significantly increased budget than what he had left after creating the anatomically correct title character,” Deadline’s report goes on to explain.
What does the titular Goblin actually look like? Well, a cake that Mikalson had whipped up for his reps might give us our first look at what to expect. Deadline explains the photo you’ll see down below, “Take a look at the cake he commissioned with Marc Gravelle at Cake Art in West Hollywood, to present to his reps as thanks for making his dream come true.”
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