It was on, it was off, it was on, it was off, and now it's on again. After more than ten years and at least four studios, Fox have stepped in to wrestle The Three Stooges from their most recent home at MGM, and if all goes to plan (which it never has before), the still-attached Farrelly Brothers will finally get to shoot it next year.
The script remains the one that the Farrellys wrote with Mike Cerrone, but everything else, particularly the casting, seems to be starting from scratch. Readers who've been following the lengthy saga will recall that, at one point, Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro and Jim Carrey were poised to become the eye-poking trio Larry, Moe and Curly. Penn dropped out for personal reasons, followed shortly afterwards by Carrey. Then Paul Giamatti was attached to replace Penn as Larry, and then there was a bit of a rumour that Penn might come back after all.
Now though, Peter Farrelly says that the roles are being "opened up to the world". He told Deadline "We'll make it with the best possible people. Our feeling is that no star is too big to audition and no matter who it is, we're going to have to see him in the role... and it could be a major movie star or an unknown."
It's not a biopic of the Vaudevillians-turned-slapstick-stars, but rather a new adventure; possibly even three, since the plan is to chop the film into a trilogy of 27-minute segments, a la the original shorts. It begins with the boys being dumped as newborns on the steps of an orphanage. Bizarrely, Richard Jenkins (The Visitor, Let Me In) is apparently in talks to play a nun.
"There will be non-stop slapping," promises Peter, "more in the tone of Dumb and Dumber than anything else we've done. Our goal is 85 minutes of laughs in a film that will be very respectful of who the Stooges were. It's by far the riskiest project we've ever done, without question, but it is also the one closest to our hearts."
The plan is currently to shoot in Atlanta, and Fox has set a start date of March 14.