Thanks to the absurd success of Michael Bay’s Transformers franchise, which may or may not have earned him enough money to actually build his own jive-talking Autobot, as well as the $650 million combined that the GI Joe films earned, there’s never going to be a studio that thinks a movie based on a toy is a bad idea. Fortunately, once Battleship barely made its money back (thanks foreign people!), Universal Pictures bailed on its seven-picture deal with Hasbro, with Ouija marking the end of that partnership this month. Happy Madison, of course, scooped up Candy Land’s rights for a live action, laugh-an-hour adaptation of the board game, while Relativity eventually gave up on Taylor Lautner as Stretch Armstrong.
That didn’t stop Hasbro from creating its own studio so it could find other ways to profit from the toys we loved as kids, and next up on the adaptation block is an animated feature of My Little Pony. According to Variety, Hasbro Studios’ Allspark Pictures, which is co-financing Scooter Braun’s live action Jem and the Holograms film, has inked Ice Age: Continental Drift scribe Joe Ballarini to write the adventures of the beloved colorful equine for a 2017 release. But don’t get your hopes up about the extinction of board game movies just yet.
“We will continue to make big tentpole movies with our studio partners,” says [Hasbro Studios president] Davis of franchises like “Transformers” and “G.I. Joe,” at Paramount, and “Monopoly” and “Candy Land” at Sony, “but there is another set of movies where we feel we have an opportunity to have a bit more control over the budgeting, financing, calendarization, marketing and creative of our films. There are new economic models that fit certain films.” (Via Variety)
Judging by the ridiculously filthy things that I found when I Googled “My Little Pony” earlier, it’s safe to say that this animated feature will fit a number of economic models. Especially the one that caters to perverts.
[Vince’s Note: “Calendarization” is not a word, you pieces of sh*t, it’s called “scheduling.”]