If nothing else, you’ve got to admire the optimism of producers Gilbert Adler and Jason A. Rosenberg. In defiance of God, the Garfield trilogy, and the evolution of the witch archetype from grizzled hag to gothy single lady who’s into crystals, the duo are banking on making an obscure comic strip about a “1,500 year-old, man-crazy witch with an attitude and a weight problem”—so, basically, the Cathy of witches—into a hit franchise.
That sassy piece of intellectual property would be Broom-Hilda, whose eponymous cartoon strip started in 1970 and is still running wherever comic strips run in 2016. Broom-Hilda’s main personality traits are that she’s fat and crass—she smokes cigars, drinks beer, and rarely changes her underwear—and is still obsessed with landing a man, which makes her inherently hilarious. But Adler finds great pathos in Broom-Hilda’s plight: “This is about a witch who has varying powers, but has a problem with weight. And if you look around, doesn’t everyone?,” he tells Deadline. “With this project everyone is concerned about their weight whether they are over or under and that can be very funny yet poignant,” he adds.
Adler plans to stretch that flimsy universal truth into a trilogy of feature films as well as various forms of TV and digital media, which makes him sounds like a wide-eyed little baby lamb of a man doomed to be ground up and turned into lamb burgers by the Hollywood machine. But he’s also the creative force behind Tales From The Crypt, which ran for seven seasons on HBO and sparked three feature films as well as an upcoming basic-cable reboot.
So maybe Adler does know what he’s talking about. Who among us hasn’t woken up with a bed full of empty beer cans?: