LittleFockers-poster-AutofellatioWalrus

You’d be hard pressed to find a trailer lamer and more lazy-looking than the one for Meet the Parents-sequel Little Fockers, which looks like it was written by a low-tech, automated comedy generator.  Let’s put it this way: the best gag in it was Robert Deniro getting stabbed in the boner.  To their credit, Universal seems to recognize this and has gone into desperation mode.  Earlier in the week, Deadline wrote:

At one point, replacing director Paul Weitz with producer-writer John Hamburg was contemplated early on and then rejected after Hamburg visited the set one weekend. That’s because everyone realized what a DGA [Director's Guild] mess this would result in. Plus, Adam Fogelson had just taken over as chairman and didn’t want to throw the already traumatized studio into a worse funk. So the decision was made to fix the movie in post. For about 4 to 5 weeks now, Weitz, Hamburg, Jay Roach, and Ben Stiller have been going through the footage. The good news is that they just decided that re-shoots aren’t needed. The not-so-good news is that they think a week of pickups with all the principal cast in September is required. Fortunately for the studio, the film is “dramatically under budget”, according to an insider. But even so it’s still a $100M film as contemplated.

$100 million?  Haha, good luck with that.  Oh, and by the way, Jay Roach is the guy who most recently directed Dinner for Schmucks.  I’ll say this, Robert DeNiro getting stabbed in the boner would’ve been a step up for that movie.  But that was two days ago.  Now Universal has a new plan.  One that involves reshoots, and Dustin Hoffman.

Vulture hears that there’s a chance that Little Fockers may actually go back into production.  [Universal is] looking into whether Dustin Hoffman might consider a last-minute reprise of his role as Bernie Focker in an effort to funny-up the comedy. Talks are well under way to see if Hoffman would be willing to return to shoot new scenes, but are a bit complicated by the fact that he’s starring in David Milch and Michael Mann’s new HBO series Luck.  [Vulture]

Dustin Hoffman, well sure.  That’s a fool-proof idea.  It worked so well for Meet the Fockers. All they have to do now is write him back into a script in which he doesn’t appear without altering the rest of the movie. like Mad Libs.  Here, I have a better, cheaper idea.  Just take the movie you’ve already shot and replace half the dialog with fart sounds.  I guarantee that’d be much funnier than whatever you end up with.