By: Eric Eisenberg

One of my favorite scenes in Doug Liman’s 1999 dark comedy Go (a movie that I highly recommend) features characters played by Timothy Olyphant and Katie Holmes sitting together in a diner and having a friendly conversation about the daily funnies. Olyphant begins to talk about his hatred for the comic strip The Family Circus, saying, “You sit down and read your paper, and you’re enjoying your entire two-page comics spread. Right? And then there’s the Family fucking Circus, bottom right-hand corner, just waiting to suck.”

While I like the scene for many reasons, the chief among them is the fact that it’s totally relatable. Anybody who has ever gone to the funnies for entertainment knows that the Bil Keane comic completely ruins the experience every goddamn time. So you know what news I’m really sad to report? They are moving forward with a Family Circus movie.

Bringing back memories of a deal made a little over two years ago, Variety has gotten word that Fox and Walden Media are once again working together to try and make a movie based on the humorless aforementioned strip and hired a pair of writers to take care of the script. Nichole Millard and Kathryn Price, who just recently sold a series pitch to ABC called Grievances, have been given the impossible task of trying to make the wholesome, Christian family worth your money at the box office.

Strangely, this news comes just days after it was announced that a CGI/live-action hybrid version of Heathcliff is in the works, but those are hardly the only comic strips that have ever been given the feature film treatment. In the past twenty years there has been a Dennis The Menace movie (which was critically trashed) and two Garfield titles (that didn’t fare much better). Don’t expect much better out of The Family Circus.

Source: Cinema Blend