According to Variety, Warner Bros. has hired Portlandia co-creator Jonathan Krisel to direct the Sesame Street movie. We don’t really know much about the project, but the Variety story says it will be a musical and that it will be “live-action,” which hopefully means it’ll have regular puppets and not CG versions of Elmo and Grover alongside a human Mr. Hooper like in one of Jon Favreau’s “live-action” movies. It sounds like the script has passed through multiple people, with Jesse Eherman from Sesame Workshop also “involved in development,” and it’s been in the works in one form or another since back around 2012.
Sadly, if anyone is hoping this will be some kind of clever deconstruction of the Sesame Street mythos—possibly one that acknowledges the show’s iconic romance—they will definitely be disappointed. If we had to guess, we’d say the movie will be like a big episode of Sesame Street, possibly with some elaborate movie parodies thrown in alongside the songs about counting. Or maybe it’ll be about puppets having sex like The Happytime Murders.