Hollywood show-and-tell day continues, as Variety reports that Legendary Entertainment is currently negotiating with Mattel for the rights to engineer a film franchise around Hot Wheels, the famed toy line of die-cast racing cars that has been entertaining children and injuring parents for over 40 years. While it seems like Hot Wheels is just the latest in a long line of toy and board game properties being hauled out of the memory closet, it’s actually one of the oldest: Columbia began developing a Hot Wheels film with McG back in 2003, with a storyline that involved an estranged father-son relationship and “a sort of Back To The Future portal,” whatever that means. That idea languished for years before eventually ending up at Warner Bros., who has apparently now scrapped it entirely in favor of—and here we pause to allow the astute among you to say it with them —“an edgier pic along the lines of Universal’s box office success Fast Five,” because that film also had cars in it. The pitch meeting went something like this: “Vroom vroom! Errrrrrrrrrrrrrk! Aaaaaaaaah! KABOOOM! And maybe someone is an undercover cop?”
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