Sometimes we all just need a good laugh. I catch myself more often than not bemoaning the latest shovelware blockbuster or washing my hands (again) of DC’s ill-considered movie franchises. And that’s a real drag, because despite what it might sometimes seem, I want these movies to be good.
Even Justice League. Even The Emoji Movie. If The Lego Movie and Trolls can somehow pull off their headshakingly terrible premises, why shouldn’t DC’s answer to The Avengers or Inside Out in your cell phone pan out just as well?
But every now and again, something like this comes along and makes it all worthwhile. Every terrible movie, obvious cash-grab and thinly veiled commercial is worth putting up with when news like this comes in through the grapevine. I mean, somebody’s actually paying money — multiple millions of dollars — to make sure that this makes its way to a theater near you.
After years of languishing in developmental Hell, Michael Bay will be producing a live-action Dora the Explorer movie: a sequel to the long-running, educational cartoon series that will see Dora grown into a teenage girl.
Let that sink in for a second. Michael Bay, the man who brought Transformers to the big screen in a movie starring sweaty, pubescent Shia LaBeouf that included giant alien robots peeing on John Turturro, is making a Dora the Explorer movie. The explosion monger responsible for high octane action flicks like Armageddon and The Rock was somebody’s first choice to head-up a movie based on cartoon about a seven-year-old teaching American kids Spanish.
Yeah, that’s something that happened. Somebody is paying a literal fortune to make this movie happen.
To be fair, Bay’s just producing the movie. It’s not like he’s actually in charge of directing it: a duty that will undoubtedly go to somebody else more suited to the task. But still, you don’t see headlines like this too often.
Even more interesting, however, is the fact that Dora is going to be a teenager in this version. They’re clearly aiming to draw in kids who were fans of her during her fourteen-year run as a little girl on TV. Personally, I would have banked on the current generation of TV-watching kids before teenagers who have already moved on to bigger and better things.
Still, in a world where we were just subjected to Geostorm and are a month and counting from Justice League, you’ve got to laugh when you can. And nothing is funnier than Michael Bay lending his name to a movie like this.
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