Relativity Media has pulled out of the long-planned Stretch Armstrong movie, their collaboration with Hasbro that was supposed to be coming out in April but never made it to production. Taylor Lautner was attached to star back when it was still at Universal, when people still thought Taylor Lautner was a movie star.
“Stretch Armstrong is an incredible character who will make an amazing movie, and we know that Hasbro has some new ideas they are looking at,” Relativity said in a statement. “Relativity and Hasbro have a tremendous relationship, and we decided to focus on other projects. We look forward to continuing to work together.”
Some people are calling this the end of an era, and God I hope so. Oh the heady days when toy and board game movies were going to be the next big thing. Back in 2008, Universal signed a suicide pact deal with Hasbro that went on to spawn plans for an Ouija Board movie from Michael Bay’s production company, a Monopoly movie from Ridley Scott, a Candyland movie, and a Clue movie from Gore Verbinski, not to mention off-brand knock-offs like a Bazooka Joe movie, Risk, and a movie based on the View-Master, which might be the dumbest idea in genre defined by incredibly dumb ideas. The cream of the crap, if you will.
Candyland moved to Sony, where it was handed off to Adam Sandler, who, by the way, was also tapped to develop a Tonka Truck movie with Sony and Hasbro. But then Battleship bombed pretty hard, and no one has heard anything about a toy movie (not counting GI Joe and Transformers, which were at least TV shows) getting near production in almost a year. Here’s to hoping that toy and board game movies are dead forever. And if they are, we should all write Rihanna a nice letter saying “Mahalo, motherf*cker!”
Mahalo means “thank you” in Hawaiian, in case that was unclear.