In the midst of a rather depressing Wall Street Journal article about Hollywood’s latest gold rush idea of agents at top agencies acquiring rights to toy brands instead of actors, came an interesting nugget. It appears that J.J. Abrams is circling a film adaptation of the Micronauts line of toys, with an eye to produce.
John Fogelman of William Morris Endeavor Entertainment LLC who owns the rights to Micronauts, Candy Land and GI Joe (and reps Abrams) says that, along with Hasbro, “We protect the [intellectual property] as if it’s the most precious metal on the planet. The studios — they don’t even get the rights to the script until the day we start principal photography. I can tell you, that’s never been done before!” So that’s why these toy movies are so shitty! Studios are throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at these toy films, and if they have any complaints about the script it’s too late because filming is already underway. How come they don’t read the script you ask? Well, apparently Hasbro plays for keeps and “studios must greenlight a movie within a number of weeks of acquiring it, or pay a $5 million kill fee directly back to Hasbro.” Pretty clever, but no wonder they’re all shite.
Abrams seems to have been popping up more and more lately, chatting about the “Star Trek” sequel and producing “Mission Impossible IV” but no formal plans have been put in place. Our guess is that he won’t start in earnest on any gigs until “Lost” wraps up its final season early next year. We would imagine “Star Trek” will be first on Abrams’ plate and hopefully by then he will have stopped drinking the Micronauts Kool-Aid his agent seems to be supplying, but he’ll probably hand it off to one of his minions anyhow. With “Transformers” already dominating the scantily-clad-girl-and-dorky-guy-save-the-world-with-robots-and-big-explosions genre fairly tied up, anything else is only going to look second rate by comparison, though admittedly, “Micronauts” especially the Marvel comic version is much, much different. [via JoBlo]