With ‘Candy Land,’ Adam Sandler pays a visit to Gramma Nutt
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Just when you worried that Hollywood’s fascination with board games was waning, it turns out it hasn’t. A day after Relativity Media decided to revive ‘Stretch Armstrong,’ which Universal had passed on, Sony has announced that it is breathing new life into ‘Candy Land,’ a different Hasbro property that had been developed but then forsaken at the Comcast-owned studio.
Sony will now make the live-action movie with Adam Sandler, retaining ‘Enchanted’ director Kevin Lima, who was attached when the film was at Universal. (Universal, incidentally, has seen its much-hyped partnership with Hasbro slowly fade away, as my colleague Ben Fritz writes, though not before it brings out its splashy Pete Berg-helmed ‘Battleship’ this spring.)
You could probably see the ‘Candy Land’ movie in your mind’s eye already — Sandler frolics through a sugary paradise with children more mature than him, imparting and learning life lessons along the way. The upside is that a new draft of the script is being written by Robert Smigel (after a previous one was penned by the writers behind ‘Kung Fu Panda.’) Smigel is the man behind Triumph the Insult Comic Dog who also wrote one of the funnier Sandler movies in recent years, “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan.”
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--Steven Zeitchik
