Smurfferic!

You know I'm not sure if I mentioned it here or not... I thought I had, but I can't seem to find anything now. Oh well, its good news to say again anyhow. The Smurfs are coming to the big screen. Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animation are coming together to bring a hybrid live action / animated film version of Les Schtroumpfs to the eagerly waiting masses

Sony has purchased the film rights from Belgin company Lafig Belgium and Charlotte's Web producer, Jordan Kerner. Funny thing though Kerner has already been working on a 3-D CG film version of the smurfs with Paramount / Nickelodeon since 2002. I'm not sure exactly how the rights for this kind of a thing go, but either there could be multiple films made, or I suspect more likely Paramount and Nick will just join forces on the feature. The nice thing about that, is that a bunch of work on the Smurfs has already been done.

The reason I thought I had talked about this before is that I'm positive I saw a behind the scenes video at Legoland or somewhere in France where they showed some footage of a CG smurf in development for the big screen Nickelodeon film. Whether this is indeed work that will be used toward the technology of creating the CG smurfs is unknown, but if it is then we're already well on the way there. Oh wait, here check this out, I couldn't find the video but here are some pics including the one to the left.

Reportedly the writers behind the second and third Shrek films are in talks to pen a script. I'm thinking this is going to be similar in look to Alvin and the Chipmunks or the Garfield films. And while I'm not positive that specifically is a great idea, I'll keep my hope alive that this will turn out to be a good, or at least better than those were. More on this, or course as it develops.
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