It’s been nothing but high-brow festival movies for the past little while, hasn’t it? Well, here’s some news from the Hollywood we know and love, as yet another ’80s movie is going to get dusted off and updated or whatever.
Right now, David Katzenberg and Seth Grahame-Smith are a pretty hot pair around town. Together they were producing and directing (respectively) the recently canceled MTV comedy “The Hard Times of RJ Berger,” but most notably, Grahame-Smith has his book “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” being adapted into a blockbuster film next summer and recently worked on the script for “Dark Shadows.” It seems that he and Tim Burton — who is producing the former and directing the latter — are getting along smashingly as Grahame-Smith and Katzenberg have just signed a two year deal with Warner Bros., and on their to-do list is a sequel to “Beetlejuice.”
There’s not word on what the storyline will be just yet — it won’t be a remake but it will be a reboot/sequel that, according to Deadline, will find the duo “advancing the storyline of the original.” We’re sorry, but a “Beetlejuice” movie without Michael Keaton is not a “Beetlejuice” movie, but we’re sure they can find some rising comedian who will be eager to take on the part (oops! we said it three times!). As for us, we’ll forever remember the original and our schoolboy crush on Winona Ryder. But at any rate, it seems Tim Burton is joining the Hollywood parade of folks dipping back into their old material, as he’s also got a feature length “Frankenweenie” on the way. We always figured Burton was getting creatively bankrupt by taking on fairy tales and TV shows, but this is getting ridiculous.
Anyway, that’s not all on the Katzenberg/Grahame-Smith duo, as they’ve got a number of projects brewing now at the WB, including: an adaptation of “We Three Kings,” Grahame-Smith’s next history-altering book about what those three guys were really doing that fateful night; “Bryantology” about a guy who creates a tax loophole for himself by founding a religion only for it to turn into a cult; “Fire Teddy” a directorial project for Katzenberg about a new guy at a company who is ordered to fire somebody, doesn’t have the heart, but becomes friends with him instead, and “Night of the Living” a Tim Burton, stop-animation production about a town of monsters invaded by humans. So get ready to hear a lot more from these guys in the near future.
