Director Paul Feig is showing off his cinematic range this year, moving from comedy to thriller with A Simple Favour. For a potential future film, he's looking to adapt a children's book, becoming part of a deal for Fox to make a movie based on Chris Van Allsburg's The Sweetest Fig.
Allsburg's work has already headed to screens via the two Jumanji movies and The Polar Express, and this features another blend of whimsy and weirdness.
Published in 1993, the story takes place in Paris and focuses on Monsieur Bibot, a wealthy dentist who lives alone in a fancy apartment with his dog Marcel, whom he often mistreats. After Bibot removes the rotting tooth of an impoverished old woman with a pair of pliers and no novocaine, he becomes enraged when she doesn’t have cash to pay him.
Instead she gives him two figs which she claims will make his dreams come true. He scoffs at her, but after eating one as a midnight snack, he finds his dream did come true and he is actually walking his dog in his underwear, and the Eiffel Tower has drooped to one side. The dentist sets himself to do a better job before eating the second fig, plotting to become France’s wealthiest man. But after his dog gobbles down the fig as it sits on the table, the dentist awakens the next morning — under his bed. He has taken the form of his dog, and he realizes that the fig eating Marcel’s dream has come true. He has gotten revenge on his cruel master by taking over his body...
Feig has tackled kid-aimed movies before with 2006's Unaccompanied Minors (known as Grounded in the UK), but this would be something more fantastical. There's no writer attached yet, so expect this one to cook away in development for a while longer. A Simple Favour, meanwhile, is out on 21 September.
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