The plot for a live-action Marmaduke movie is a no-brainer: Marmaduke, the beloved, gentle, dopey Great Dane from the comic strip, ascends the British throne after all the members of the royal family and every human being in the line of succession are accidentally electrocuted when they assemble on the wet lawn of Windsor Castle for a group photo. (Yes, this is basically the plot of King Ralph, but it's been far too long since a comedy opened with a mass elecrocution.) Marmaduke wears a crown on his adorable dog head, scratches himself while greeting heads of state, eats Beggin strips from crystal goblets, and in general wins the heart of the nation with his adorable dog king ways. Title: Marmaduke Of Wales DVD sales: $1 billion.
Surprisingly though the director of Marmaduke has decided to go in a different, angsty-er direction with his big dumb dog movie.
From USA Today:
Tom Dey is smiling at a wide computer screen in an editing studio at 20th Century Fox: A shy romantic greeting is unfolding between the hunky lead character and his soon-to-be girlfriend…
"We've approached the movie like a John Hughes movie with dogs," Tom Dey [director of Marmaduke] says. "The dog park is like high school for dogs. To make this kind of movie, you really have to understand that it is the dog's world and we just live in it."
The kinds of rich characterizations Hughes embodied in teenage stars such as Matthew Broderick in Ferris Bueller's Day Off translate to the Marmaduke story lines, Dey says, including one theme about "the vulnerabilities" of Marmaduke.
"Marmaduke is a teenager, and he's trying to find his way in the world," Dey says. "It's a boy-meets-girl story, a coming-of-age and cautionary tale. My job as director is to try to place the audience inside this world."
Marmaduke is like a teenager—self-conscious, insecure, struggling to pick an identity and not hump it, afraid of going to the vet to get neutered. Obviously there's a reason why the first draft of John Hughes' The Breakfast Club ended with, "You see us as you want to see us…but what we found out is that each one of us is a brain, and an athlete, and a basket case, and a princess, and a Great Dane."