Although life itself—what with its many gently comical misunderstandings and accidental malapropisms that tickle the belly of baby Jesus—is already a perfectly dandy script for a Family Circus movie, sometimes you also need a dashed line to follow to keep you from becoming too distracted with petting a dog to proceed to talk to the mailman, and other things that are hilariously true. And so, writers have finally been hired for Fox's two-years-in-the-making, live-action adaptation of Bil Keane's comic panel about the exhausted parents to several hideously misshapen children, whose swollen heads are so dizzy with intracranial pressure that they're constantly at the mercy of a world whose nuances they can never hope to comprehend, and who spend their days in confusion, tormented by the hallucinations of malevolent spirits Ida Know and Not Me.
Converting this cruel humor of mocking the kids' mangled, helpless pronunciations of "pasghetti and meat bulbs" before they vomit and black out will be the job of Nichole Millard and Kathryn Price, who previously wrote Disney's The Game Plan. There's still no word yet on the specific plot of their Family Circus movie, but like that film, it will no doubt deal with the universal comedy of children being an unbearable but intermittently amusing hardship.