If you’re not a part of the snooty New York theater scene, you might not have been aware that South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Book of Mormon musical has been playing to rave reviews and sold out shows on Broadway for about a month now.  That may or may not be a huge accomplishment considering their competition is stuff like Legally Blonde and the U2 Spider-Man play, but they did create it with Avenue Q‘s Robert Lopez, and I can confirm that Avenue Q is amazing.  Now several sites are reporting that Book of Mormon could be coming to theaters, and I mean the American kind, with popcorn and Coke, not those fruity pinko ones with the programs and the intermissions.  So why the question mark in the headline?  Well, here’s the quote at the crux of the reports, from Deadline’s Mike Fleming:

So what will happen when producer Scott Rudin inevitably shops the Broadway musical to become a movie musical? “We’ve learned in our careers that as long as something is successful, they will give you money for it,” Parker tells me. “They just want to make money in Hollywood, they don’t really care. As long as the musical continues to do well, I don’t think it’s going to be hard at all.”

So… does that mean Scott Rudin actually is shopping the Broadway musical as a movie musical?  Uh… maybe?  That’s the way most sites are reporting it.  As we’ve seen before, sometimes it’s hard to tell what the f*ck Mike Fleming is talking about.  In any case, there doesn’t seem to be any reason it couldn’t become a movie.  Also, it sounds awesome:

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South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone are teaming up with a writer of the puppet play Avenue Q to bring Mormon Musical to Broadway.

“Mormon Musical” will start rehearsals next month and star Cheyenne Jackson.
The new show is “hilarious – very acerbic and biting,” said Jackson, whose last Broadway show was “Xanadu.”
It deals with the lives and loves of Mormons and “offends everybody, but [also] does what ‘South Park’ does best, which is by the end, it comes around and has something great to say,” Jackson said. [NY Post]

I’m pretty wary whenever pop culture deals with Mormons because I love making fun of them, and all it would take is one or two A-holes to completely ruin it for me.  But Avenue Q is pretty much the best play ever and the Mormon episode of South Park (you can watch the full episode for free here) is one of the most honest (yet still funny) portrayals of Mormons I’ve ever seen.  Bottom line, it’s going to be a shame when they outbreed us all.  In fact, it’s a travesty that there are so many zombie movies when the Mormon invasion theme is completely untapped.  Mormons are scarier than zombies because they smile all the time and have stupid haircuts.  Plus they drink pee and consume the flesh of the unborn.  So I’ve heard.

Supposedly, this is part one (part two after the jump) of a 1995 corporate training video made by pre-South Park Trey Parker and Matt Stone.  Universal comissioned the video, so the story goes, after the studio was bought by Seagram’s and wanted to reassure people that, despite their new ownership, they would remain artist friendly.

The story sounds fishy to me, because in 1995, I don’t know what the studio would’ve had to go on besides Cannibal the Musical and an animated short Parker and Stone made in college – both of which would’ve been clues that Universal would get what they supposedly got: a really funny video they couldn’t use.  Then again, movie studio execs are notoriously stupid.

Anyway, regardless of the real story behind it, it has cameos from Sly Stallone, Michael J. Fox, Brian Grazer, Demi Moore, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Angela Lansbury and your mom.  Ha, just kidding about that last one.  Unless your mom is Angela Lansbury. 

[Thanks to Nominus for the tip]