What the Smurf?! E.T. Returns

E.T. To Phone Home...Again

from Dark Horizons

Drew Barrymore and director Steven Spielberg are in talks to make a sequel to the 1982 Hollywood classic ET: The Extraterrestrial reports WENN.

Barrymore is apparently anxious to resume her role as Gertie, but only if Spielberg, who directed the first film, agrees to oversee the project. According to reports, the sequel will see ET return to a now grown-up Gertie, desperate for help saving his family from extinction.

"Drew has spoken to Steven about it," a Hollywood insider said. "Although he thought she was joking at first, he's actually giving it serious thought. Drew thinks the world needs another feelgood movie like E.T. right now and she's prepared to work with Steven to make it happen."


A Smurfin' Movie Deal

from E! Online

Fans of a certain animated tribe of small, blue woodland creatures haven't gotten a lot of love lately: No new TV episodes, no old TV episodes on DVD (outside of a couple of import releases), no real news on a long-rumored movie.

Now, finally, things are looking rather smurfin'.

A 3-D, CGI-animated Smurfs feature film will bow in theaters in 2008, Daily Variety reported Tuesday. The extravaganza from Paramount's Nickelodeon Movies will be the first in a planned trilogy, it said. According to Newsweek, the project has been trying to get off the ground since at least 2003.

"Dude, a Smurf movie?" went a message-board post on TheMovieBlog.com last month after Newsweek noted a film was nigh. "That's the smurfing best thing I've heard in smurfing forever."

The Smurfs were a phenomenon of the 1980s, unless one lived in Europe, where the characters have been mainstays since 1958, when Belgian artist Pierre Culliford, better known as Peyo, introduced them in the comic pages. The new movie's planned release date supposedly is tied to Smurfdom's upcoming 50th birthday.

Peyo's creations - the aforementioned small, blue woodland creatures who lived in homes shaped like mushrooms, whistled happy tunes, conjugated the word "smurf" in any way they saw fit, and named themselves Ramones-style (Papa Smurf, Brainy Smurf, Grouchy Smurf, etc.) - blew up as big as any Transformer robot in 1981 when The Smurfs debuted on NBC. The Hanna-Barbera-produced series won two Daytime Emmys, moved much merchandise, from Smurf-Berry Crunch cereal to countless figurines, and dominated Saturday morning TV until 1990. A 1983 big-screen adventure, The Smurfs and the Magic Flute, grossed $11 million, per the box-office site The-Numbers.com, even though it was nothing more than a retitled, redubbed version of a 1976 Belgian-produced movie.