The pilot development season that is the past 100-plus years of cinema continues to yield impressive dividends, as more and more movies get to move on to the next stage of becoming TV shows. Adding to a growing list that’s included everything from Romancing The Stone to Reality Bites, there are now TV series in the works based on Limitless, Act Of Valor, and The Money Pit—each being considered to graduate from the sticky slums of the movie theater to weekly broadcast in audiences’ homes, where people’s nice stuff is.
Bradley Cooper will executive produce the TV version of his 2011 surprise hit Limitless, in which he stars as a writer who takes a mind-enhancing experimental drug, which soon helps him realize that being a writer sucks and that he could use a haircut. The series would spend even more time on that character showing off week to week while also being pursued by various “shadowy forces”—presumably while also pairing him with a skeptical detective with whom he solves crimes, because this is television.
Limitless producers Relativity have also sold National Geographic on a scripted series based on Act Of Valor, their 2012 Navy SEAL film that—like so much of National Geographic already—blurs the lines between fact and fiction, making this a natural progression for the network. Like the movie, Act Of Valor will draw from the stories of a very specific group of soldiers—in this case the Air Force’s pararescue team, who’s charged with recovering and providing medical services to those in combat. Unlike Act Of Valor, no one can complain that it’s military propaganda, because what, you have a problem with rescuing wounded soldiers? Well, it’s scheduled to begin production in 2014, so you have a year to get over your sick desire to see America's wounded soldiers go unrescued, communist.
And finally, NBC—undeterred by Lucky 7’s swift cancellation—is sinking its development funds into buying another show from Steven Spielberg’s Amblin that boasts a title ripe for ironic outcome, this time a sitcom based on The Money Pit. The 1986 comedy starred Tom Hanks and Shelley Long as a couple that slowly unravels as they attempt to fix up a dilapidated mansion. The TV series from The Office’s Justin Spitzer will presumably find their TV equivalents (and/or some guy and a humbled Shelley Long) dealing with something else breaking every week, until at last they get their dream home fixed up just in time for the series finale, then realize that they’re now so behind on their mortgage that the bank is foreclosing on it, leaving them completely destitute.
Like its fellow TV-to-movie projects, this hilarious comedy about two people pratfalling their way to a murder-suicide pact is being developed for your own home you’re constantly worried about paying for—but cheer up. Soon there will be plenty of squatting space in those increasingly useless movie theaters.