Sid and Marty Krofft are famous for creating a whole bunch of shows that seem retarded to me but are great according to people who smoked a lot of pot in the 70s.  They’ve got an H.R. Pufnstuf movie in production now. Marty Krofft says they want to use Where the Wild Things Are as inspiration, which is easy to say now that it was successful, but his reasons seem sort of contradictory.  From NYDailyNews:

“‘Wild Things’ is very, very good for us,” says Marty Krofft. “We always wanted to do low-tech costumes and high-tech heads. But it’ll be a big difference in tone, of course — we’ll be bright, not dark.”

After “Land of the Lost,” Krofft says he and his brother learned some valuable lessons.

“We went with comedy, which got it green-lit. But we didn’t know it was going to go so far in the PG-13 direction and so close to an R rating,” he says of the unfortunate flop. “Our characters are all likable, and we have so much goodwill from our fans. So, now we know: Don’t mess with what’s worked.”

Dude, your fans are all 40 years old now, you think they care about the ratings?  And your stuff worked back when there were five channels.  Take a look at what you’re trying not to mess with:

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Dreamworks presents: WILD THING!  (thanks to FilmDrunkard Adam for sending this in)

Daily Circle Jerk Links:

• 25 pumpkins vomiting. |HolyTaco|
• New number one threat to America?  Ice-skating bears. |FListed|
• Where the Wild Things Are + Hockey = this. |WithLeather|
• Where the Wild Things Are as done by Rob Zombie (boy, a lot of Wild Things stuff today, huh?) |G4|
• Home Shopping Network Nintendo Wii disaster.  You know, if it weren’t for stuff like this, I wouldn’t know HSN or local TV existed. |Asylum|
• Stars who gain and lose weight for movie roles.  Christ Jim Carrey looks like hell. |GetBack|
• David Hasselhoff getting a reality show.  He was a lot cooler before people realized he wasn’t kidding.  |ScreenJunkies|
• Buy the batmobile for a good cause.  You know, like banging chicks in the batmobile.  That seems like a awesome cause to me. |ComicsAlliance|
• Dinner dirty talk |Atom|

I also thought this helpful guide to what Marcellus Wallace looks like was pretty awesome:

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(Hot chicks dykin’ out?  Hell yeah, now it’s a wild rumpus.)

Where the Wild Things Are is one of the weirder mainstream movies I’ve ever seen.  The pacing is… off. It drags in spots. You’re not sure where it’s going, it feels like an imprecise parable, and it’s full of non-sequitirs.  But in a way, it’s a perfect adaptation of the book — a book which is only ten sentences long and, if you read it as adult, isn’t even that well written.  But there’s something strange and fantastic about it that it’s stuck with so many of us as a pleasant feeling well into adulthood, like an awesome dream you can’t fully articulate and doesn’t make sense after you wake up.  Like the memory of reading the book for the first time, much of WTWTA is like being trapped in the mind of a 10-year-old, but it’s more like the 10-year-old you remember being, rather than the idiot 10-year-old Michael Bay makes movies for.

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Everyone knows movie people love self-congratulatory circle jerks, but they’ve got nothing on the people who market them.  Remember The Dark Knight?  Its success had nothing to do with it being a good movie, it was all because of the “rich transmedia experience” designed by the marketing visionaries at 42 Entertainment.  And according to this new LA Times article, Where the Wild Things Are‘s success?  You guessed it, all because of marketing.

If they gave out Oscars for marketing campaigns, you could pretty much hand out the trophy right now to Warner Bros. marketing chief Sue Kroll, who almost single-handedly managed to find an audience [this may be one of the stupidest phrases I have ever read -Ed.] for “Where the Wild Things Are,” the new family movie that turned out not to really be a family movie at all.

You “found an audience” for a movie that defies genre?  Oh my God, let’s rename the sun in your honor!

According to Hollywood conventional wisdom, “Where the Wild Things Are” looked like a disaster in the making. Over budget and beset by endless delays, the movie kept being pushed back on the Warners schedule, picking up a nasty case of bad buzz after word leaked out that children had fled an early test screening in tears, put off by the dark tone of the film.

Hollywood conventional wisdom is the thing that gave us The Rock as the Tooth Fairy, remember? And I don’t know who you hang with, but where I’m from, “makes children cry” is the highest compliment you can give something.
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(IF YOU LIKED WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE, YOU’LL LOVE G-FORCE. Thanks but no thanks, Washington Post.)

Where the Wild Things Are landed at number one with $32 million, exceeding studio expectations and spawning countless rumpus puns.  People were sort of worried about it because they weren’t sure whether it was a kids film.  Turns out it’s not, it didn’t matter, and kids don’t know anything anyway so screw them.  Overall the box office was up 39% over the same weekend last year, which means there’s plenty of money for your unproduced script graphic novel, provided it involves zombies.

Law Abiding Citizen was a surprising number two, and made $21 mil, despite awful reviews and, to my eyes, looking pretty generic.  But good for Jamie Foxx, he’s always seemed so humble.

Paranormal Activity made $20 mil for the weekend and is up to $34 mil total, which isn’t bad on a $15,000 production budget.  And that was on only 760 screens (compared to WTWTA’s 3,735).  It will continue to expand and if it doesn’t earn more than Saw VI when it comes out in two weeks, there is no God.

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