Future Adult Fairy Tale Movie Adaptations on Hollywood's Slate

Hollywood has taken yet another road in avoiding being so blatant doing remakes. Instead of remaking older, classic movies, the idea has been set to plunder the sometimes unknowingly morose worlds of the Mother Goose or Brothers Grimm fairy tale. Of course, the world of the fairy tale is vast and provides two decades' worth of material for Hollywood.

According to secret sources I have from the film world, we should get ready for plenty more in the next couple of years beyond "Red Riding Hood", "Snow White" and "Sleeping Beauty." In development will be these darkly modern takes from Ms. Mother Goose and the truly Grimm Brothers:

"Little Miss Muffet" (Projected for Summer 2012)

This modern take on the famous and terse Mother Goose tale will bring Little Miss Muffet up to date as a modern woman who ironically happens to be a filmmaker. Sources say that casting won't necessarily require an actress who is little, though notes on a third draft suggest she exceed the height of Tom Cruise by at least one inch. Rumors are that Mr. Cruise is being courted to play not the spider but the CEO of a food company that produces Curds and Whey dinners.

In the tale, Alexandra Muffet is a single movie director and producer making an indie documentary about false health claims in a frozen dinner company. Curds & Whey, the frozen dinner brand, claims to be a healthy mix of dinners, with the worst being cottage cheese paired with rumored marijuana brownie. Miss Muffet seeks out to prove in her documentary that they all contain illegal drugs and cancer-causing preservatives. The CEO of Curds & Whey (Cruise) sends out a henchman to try to sabotage the film directly on the set.

Reports say Charlie Sheen has already agreed to play the role of Mr. Spyder who's sent to destroy all of Miss Muffet's expensive production equipment. In a pivotal scene, Miss Muffet sits in a director's chair she christens "The Tuffet" and intends to partake in tasting a Curds & Whey dinner to the cameras. Prior, Mr. Spyder spikes the dinner with what's known in a working draft as The Spyder Drug.

While hanging by an aerial wire overhead, Mr. Spyder lowers himself over Miss Muffet to scare her to potential death. Instead, the wire snaps. At this point, reports say the production would technically have a three-month delay to recover from injuries.

Afterward, a dangerous love triangle develops among Miss Muffet, Mr. Spyder and Cruise's CEO character.

Other drafts have "The Tuffet" being everything from a Lexus, a bathroom stall to perhaps Mr. Spyder himself in an R-rated version.

"Little Jack Horner" (Winter 2012 or Spring 2013)

Jack Black is being courted to star in this take on Little Jack Horner that will stay in the time period and environment in which it was written. Rumor is that Jack Black will be run through CGI motion capture to appear as a little boy in 1800's Western Europe to contrast himself as a prior giant to Lilliputians in "Gulliver's Travels." In the adaptation, Jack Black will mostly carry the film himself.

Black will play an ornery and spoiled little boy who gets everything he wants on Christmas. But his parents, Father and Mother Horner, only bake delicious pies for other children in the village rather than for Jack. This instigates a violent fit on the part of Jack who's sent to sit in a corner for the rest of Christmas Day and night. After several hours, his parents relent and give him a pie anyway, however forcing him to stay put in the corner while he eats the pie.

During a pivotal, extended scene, Jack Black will reportedly show the acting nuances of devouring a pie with ones fingers, all the way down to discovering his plum. Notes on a fourth draft say that the movie will borrow the prosthetic large thumbs used in Gus Van Sant's "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" to emphasize Jack's discovery of the plum out of the pie.

Once Jack finds the plum, the line "What a good boy am I...not!" will be uttered as a slight revisionist quirk. To expand the movie, Jack will defy his punishment, lock his parents in a closet and take over the house for the next 90 minutes of the movie. He'll forthwith sell all his parents' pies at 2011 prices.

Notes say several scenes of Jack holding his hands to his cheeks with mouth agape will make the movie somewhat more marketable.

"Hansel & Gretel" (Christmas, 2012)

The Grimm Brothers get plundered again, this time with the untapped movie adaptation of the two children who happen to find an edible house inhabited by a witch in the forest. In this creative adaptation, we have a strange combination of a modern to future Los Angeles world mixed with a Brothers Grimm European sensibility.

Suburban Los Angeles is filled with little 1800's-era German abodes. A major economic devastation has forced some economic classes to live this way. In one, a lumber worker and his wife can barely feed their son and daughter, Hansel and Gretel. When their mother refuses to take the kids into the wilds of Burbank to find some wild game for dinner, the kids practice their best Burbankian accents in the middle of the night to go there themselves.

Hansel and Gretel leave behind the pieces of an undetermined product placement on their path leading to Burbank to help them find their way back. After stopping to camp for the night, they find out the next morning that inland seagulls have eaten all of the pieces of the undetermined product placement. This leads them into an unfamiliar neighborhood of mansions in the greater Hollywood hills.

One particular home that happens to be up for sale is made entirely of gingerbread. Hansel and Gretel eat a good portion of the roof recently coated for the winter with frosting. It's then when the witch opens the door and offers the kids shelter. As a proposed message to children, it turns out the witch was a nurse in a former life and tests the blood sugar of the kids. Both have high readings and get an education from the witch in how to eat right.

Her hand in helping them bake a healthy meal using Rachael Ray cookbooks becomes the ploy to put the children in the oven for dinner. It's when she places the children in cages that Hansel and Gretel realize she's the serial killer their parents warned about who reportedly lives in the woods. Rachael Ray turned down an offer to play a scantily-clad witch.

Gretel manages to push the witch into the oven after an escape. Rather than kill the witch, though, the script will end with an injured witch standing trial for attempted murder and broadcast on Grimm TV News. Her house is foreclosed and eaten to the last crumb by the poor within the county.

Health care premiums rise.

Others in Very Early Development

Hans Christian Andersen and the fables of Aesop will also be heading into first-time movie adaptations. Andersen's "The Emperor's New Clothes" will be strictly live action this time and reportedly star Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as the emperor. In his film debut, fashion guru Tim Gunn will play both roles of the tailors via the magic of CGI. To continue more social themes in movies, the emperor will have a temporary relationship with one of the tailors after one of them tells the emperor he "looks gawgeous!" in his invisible clothes.

And because Aesop's Fables have never been adapted into live-action form before, a number of them will arrive in the next two years. The one you can expect first by Christmas, 2012 is "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" starring Joaquin Phoenix. "The Ass and the Pig" follows suit with cast, rewrite of title and script still in consideration.