Director Ron Howard To Do Spy Vs Spy Movie!

Here’s the latest in what is a long line of “What-the-hell-were-they-thinking” projects.

If you read MAD Magazine when you were a kid (I read it religiously), you’ll be familiar with the Spy Vs Spy comic strip. Basically, two rival spies, one white and the other black, try to outsmart each other using all kinds of crazy plans and gadgets. It was throwaway fun, something I enjoyed but not as much as the magazine’s movie parodies and satire pieces. It’s pretty thin material for a full-length feature film. Then again, we’re talking about an industry that can turn theme park rides and friggin’ boardgames into full-length feature films. So this should be “easy” for Hollywood. The man they’ve secured for the job of bringing the spies to life is Ron Howard, he of the decidedly mainstream fare like “Backdraft”, “Willow” and “Apollo 13″ (plus crap like “The DaVinci Code”).

Deadline today reported that the project has also gained some screenwriters, in David Koepp and John Kamps. Koepp wrote hits like “Spider-man” and “Jurassic Park”, so he may be able to squeeze out an interesting angle for this. The only thing is, he’s merely overseeing the screenplay (that Kamps will write).

If this is to be a live-action film, I have NO idea how they’ll treat the highly-stylised characters. I mean, the Spies are basically triangles with eyes and mouths. Please let this be animation. But somehow I doubt it will be…