It’s not news that Hollywood has long since run out of original ideas, and nowhere is this more apparent than with children’s movies, which largely depend upon the nostalgia of parents who decide exactly which piles of cinematic crap upon which to spend their almighty dollar. Most recently, filmmakers have dubiously polished up old favorites like Alvin and the Chipmunks, Yogi Bear, and The Smurfs. As if that weren’t enough, board games are also now fair game. You may have already heard about the upcoming Candy Land movie, but it’s going to be even worse than you could ever imagine because the screenwriters are taking things all too seriously and are preparing to fashion a highly complex world in manner of Lord of The Rings. Will Gollum be involved in this mess? One can only hope:

Admit it. You think the Candy Land movie is one of the worst ideas in Hollywood history. A movie based on the children’s board game that itself seems specifically designed to numb the adult mind with its winding rainbow path past the domains of the nefarious Duke of Swirl and Lord Licorice and into King Kandy’s scrumptious kingdom. But what if the Cupcake Commons were, say, the Shire, and the Chocolate Mountains were Mordor? Because that’s what the Candy Land writers have in mind. Jonathan Aibel, who co-wrote Kung Fu Panda 2 with Glenn Berger, told EW at yesterday’s Hollywood premiere that they have ambitious plans: We envision it as Lord of The Rings, but set in a world of candy.”

The Lord of the Rings. In a world of candy.

“We don’t see it as a movie based on a board game, although it has characters from that world and takes the idea of people finding themselves in a world that happens to be made entirely of candy where there are huge battles going on,” Berger says. “We are going for real comedy, real action, and real emotions at stake.”

[From Popwatch]

Naturally, this sounds utterly disastrous, but I can sort of see why the screenwriters would get ambitious here because they’ve probably been instructed by the studio to fashion this as the first installment in a prospective trilogy. Still, Candy Land is an exceedingly simple game that’s geared towards children aged 3-6, and these very young children are the presumed target audience as well. Instead of making a proper movie for this age group, what will probably happen is that the poor children will be bored out of their skulls by all of the intricacy involved with a LOTR-styled universe, and the parents will get pissed off because their kids won’t sit still at all. And of course, you know this movie will probably end up being in 3-D, which will only further emphasize the parents’ subsequent irritation (and the irritation of their pocketbooks) after surviving this nonsense. So in all likelihood, there will be no trilogy at all, but if the filmmakers somehow wise up and choose to fashion this movie like, say, Gnomeo and Juliet, there might actually be some hope. In the alternative, the screenwriters could also just have Viggo Mortensen ride through on a horse, which would at least give the audience some real eye candy, don’t you think?

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