Though it’s a little late for the big day, Deadline is reporting that popular(?) Easter candy Peeps is becoming a movie “in the spirit of Trolls-meets-Smurfs” even though that’s not helpful at all. Trolls is already a pop culture concept, even if the movies aren’t strictly about dolls with ridiculous hair, and Smurfs had an existing storyline and characters when they started making movies. Peeps is candy. There are probably Peeps characters that diehard Peeps fans know from some ancient advertising campaign, but that hardly counts.
And yet, Peeps is becoming a movie, thanks to production company Wonder Street’s Christine and Mark Holder (who recently produced The Mauritanian, a movie that is the complete opposite of Peeps). Deadline says the movie will be about “a ragtag group of Peeps characters who set out on a cross-country journey in order to attend Peepsfest, an annual brand celebration in Pennsylvania,” which… heavy sigh. Does it make it better or worse to know that Peepsfest is a real thing? Movies like this are always a commercial, but it feels different when the thing it’s a commercial for is candy. Obviously part of this plays into an insidious scheme to turn Peeps from a popular(?) Easter candy into a popular(?) all-year candy, so it’ll at least be interesting to see if Peeps introduces more evergreen shapes or if they just start to insist that the springtime-themed chicks are appropriate for all seasons.
This also isn’t the first time that the Peeps people (peepsle?) tried to make a Peeps movie happen. Back in 2014, Detroit Rock City’s Adam Rifkin picked up the rights on clearance at the local Walgreens, presumably while buying something else, but Deadline doesn’t say anything about Rifkin being involved. Maybe he left the rights out too long and they got all stale and gross? Or he put them in the microwave and they exploded? Or a third example of something that happens to Peeps?