Citing a need to have something to thumb through while on the phone with casting or occasionally toss at an assistant in a dramatic manner, Relativity and Paramount have commissioned new scripts for their respective Stretch Armstrong and Ringling Bros. projects, which have yet to become fully completed films with merchandising back-ends despite their recognizable titles. "They're just sitting there, after I already had the posters mocked up. What more does it take?" an executive from each studio thought bitterly to themselves, before giving up and contracting writers to begin assembling enough clichés for them to start selling toys already.
Smurfs writing team David Stem and David Weiss have been drafted to handle Paramount's Ringling Bros. project, which will take a "Night At The Museum and Charlie And The Chocolate Factory" approach to using the legendary circus as a backdrop for various formulaic family comedy vignettes, potentially involving elephant dung and a dance number set to an old-school rap song, depending on the dictations of their flowchart. Meanwhile, Relativity and Hasbro have hired Dean Georgaris, writer of The Manchurian Candidate remake, to fashion vintage rubber toy Stretch Armstrong into a "plausible, action-oriented family picture," possibly out of spite. Both scripts have been asked to meet the demanding expectations that they will be written legibly on paper or, at the very least, emailed in a file that can then be printed out.