Every year, The Black List puts out a list of the coolest screenplays that nobody is making. It's ranked based on votes by hundreds of Hollywood execs. In 2015, the No. 1 script was Bubbles, a movie narrated by Michael Jackson's moonwalking pet chimp that was by The King of Pop's side for much of the 1980s. The screenplay details Bubbles the Chimp's life with the pop star through the scandals that came to define the latter part of MJ's life.
Well, the Bubbles script will sit idle no longer. It's finally getting made, and it turns out it's going to be even weirder than it originally sounded. Deadline reports that Dan Harmon, the guy who created Community and made the critically-acclaimed and Oscar-nominated stop-motion comedic drama Anomalisa last year is executive producing Bubbles, which will be another stop-motion film in the style of Anomalisa.
The story will be seen through the eyes of Bubbles, which Jackson adopted as a baby in 1983 and kept until 2003 when he'd become a large and aggressive adult chimp. Since 2005, Bubbles has lived at the Center for Great Apes, a sanctuary in Florida. It won't be Bubbles first appearance in the media, of course. He showed up in Jackson's '90s video game Michael Jackson's Moonwalker, and later in Michael Jackson and Bubbles, a multi-part Animal Planet documentary. Also, as we said before, the chimp could moonwalk.
Since the Jackson estate is unlikely to authorize an MJ biopic anytime soon, especially one that goes deep into the difficult questions about the singer's life, this approach is "considered a very inventive way to tell an unauthorized story of Jackson without needing permission," according to the report.
