Many years ago, a humble message board spawned the concept of Caturday — a time for everyone to post some cats. Over veritable internet generations, the cat meme has metastasized, through YouTube and Tumblr and now, it seems, Hollywood. According to Deadline and The Wall Street Journal, the manager of the perpetually disgruntled feline Grumpy Cat is working with Broken Road Productions to produce a comedy with Grumpy Cat as its star. “We think we can build a big family comedy around this character,” says Todd Garner, who has worked as an executive producer on films like Vin Diesel’s xXx and Adam Sandler vehicle Anger Management.
Grumpy Cat gets movie deal, will reportedly star in ‘big family comedy’
is a senior tech and policy editor focused on online platforms and free expression. Adi has covered virtual and augmented reality, the history of computing, and more for The Verge since 2011.
This will, in fact, be Grumpy Cat’s second film deal. Earlier this year, we saw her in Lil Bub & Friendz, a Vice documentary capitalizing on the popularity of Nyan Cat, “world’s cutest cat” Lil Bub, and other memetic animals. The unnamed Grumpy Cat project is described as a “Garfield-style feature film,” referring either to the oft-remixed comic or the terrifying live-action adaptation, and Grumpy Cat will apparently be given “the power of speech.” We had mixed feelings about Lil Bub & Friendz, but obviously, a broad family comedy based on a series of image macros is a very different beast. In fact, as far as we can tell, there’s literally no way this could go wrong.
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