Moving us ever closer to Ball And Cup: The String’s Revolt, Paramount’s burgeoning development deal with Mattel Toys has been extended to include “a live action-adventure film” based on Magic 8-Ball, the decades-old fortune-telling toy that helps introduce children to flippant decision-making/the occult through the “magic” of blue dye. Screenwriters Jon Gunn and John Mann have now been tasked with translating the thrill-a-minute suspense of asking a yes-or-no question of an omnipotent die covered in mostly affirmative, occasionally vague and non-committal, and rarely outright negative answers (and all without coming off like, say, some sort of YouTube parody of The Da Vinci Code).
You may remember Gunn and Mann as the creative team behind the Eric Roberts “Christian action-adventure,” Mercy Streets (tagline: “A life of faith has just been threatened by a life of crime”), but more likely you will remember Jon Gunn as the co-director of My Date With Drew, where Gunn helped his friend Brian Herzlinger stalk Drew Barrymore until Herzlinger could ask her to love him and she was all, “Outlook not so good.” Ha ha! See? We just used a popular response from the Magic 8-Ball, one of 20 pre-set answers that are no doubt fanning the flames of inspiration at this very moment, until they engulf the film industry in a raging, four-alarm inferno. Save yourselves!