[Spoilers for the Child’s Play reboot]
Child’s Play — which debuted with a stronger-than-expected $14.1 million at the box office — should not be confused with Child’s Play, legally speaking. Let me explain: the new Child’s Play, the one starring Aubrey Plaza and Bryan Tyree Henry, is a reboot of 1988’s Child’s Play, but not any of its many sequels due to “MGM [retaining] the rights to the first movie,” according to franchise creator Don Mancini (who has nothing to do with the new film; neither does Brad Dourif, the voice of Chucky). It’s all very complicated — and that’s even before you get into the Chucky TV show — or as director Lars Klevberg put it in a recent interview with Bloody Disgusting, “There are some strange rules about all these law things,” including a death scene he legally wasn’t allowed to film.
“If [anything in the new film] resembled something from the other movies – from the first Child’s Play movies, like 2, 3, and also some of the Chucky movies – you couldn’t go into that, even if it wasn’t anything quite near it but it kind of felt similar, you couldn’t do it,” Klevberg said. He then gave an example:
“One story about that is the [Karen’s boyfriend] Shane kill, when he takes off his face. In the original draft, Chucky chops off his head. So he puts the whole head on the desk for Andy, but apparently, they do it in the second or third one or something, so we couldn’t do that. I was like, that’s ridiculous. Why can’t we? Like, they do that in any other movie. No, we can’t, it’s not okay. So then you’re forced [to] come up with something different, and an idea that I had was, ‘Okay, can he chop off his face and stick it to a watermelon?’ ‘Sure, that you can do.’ Great, let’s do it.”
All the best comprises in life involve chopping off someone’s face and putting it on a watermelon.
(Via Bloody Disgusting)
