The story centers on four not-so-young
orphans: one reared by a curator at the Louvre (where an
albino assassin lurks); another, a refugee from Mexican
“libre” wrestling; the third a recent victim of snakes on
her plane; and the fourth a “normal” resident of a mutant
“X”-community. The hapless quartet visits a chocolate
factory, where they stumble into an enchanted wardrobe that
transports them to the land of Gnarnia (with a silent “G”).
There they meet a flamboyant pirate captain and earnest
students of wizardry – and join forces with, among others, a
wise-but-horny lion to defeat the evil White Bitch of
Gnarnia.
EPIC MOVIE comes from the new masters of the parody genre –
Jason Friedberg & Aaron Seltzer – who now set their parodic
sights on the largest genre of them all: Hollywood’s
big-budget, special effects-laden, blockbuster franchise
films. After successfully skewering the scary movie and
romantic comedy franchises as two of the six writers of
“Scary Movie,” and as the writers/director of “Date Movie,”
the duo now focus on this untapped niche – Hollywood’s
summer and fall tentpoles - proving once again that they are
proud of being “first to be second.”
For the last thirty years, from “Airplane” to “Hot Shots” to
“Scary Movie,” parodic comedies have focused on specific
movie genres. With the studios’ ongoing deluge of summer and
holiday blockbusters becoming the norm, writers/directors
Jason Friedberg & Aaron Seltzer felt the time was ripe to
expand the scope of genre parodies to include recent action
films, comic book films, and children’s fantasy films.
The idea for the film came to Friedberg and Seltzer while
they were making “Date Movie” with producer Paul Schiff. “We
had so much fun making that movie we didn’t want to stop, so
we came up with another one,” says Schiff. “We were just
brainstorming and talking about targets of opportunities
ripe for parodies.”
Friedberg and Seltzer decided to build the framework for the
film around the general plot of “The Chronicles of Narnia:
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.” Thus was born the
characters of Edward, Peter, Susan and Lucy – four unrelated
orphans in search of their homes, who are magically
transported into the fantasy world of Gnarnia (“with a G,
like Gnarly”), where they meet The White Bitch (Jennifer
Coolidge), and her team of assistants and assassins. Along
the way they meet numerous incarnations of characters from
recent tentpole films.
“We just like these movies and thought they’d be great
movies to ridicule,” says Aaron Seltzer. “Like ‘The Da Vinci
Code’ and ‘Superman’ and ‘X-Men’ and ‘Nacho Libre.’ It just
seemed like fun to parody them all, using ‘Narnia’ as the
broad outline, and then it just stemmed from there.”
TM and ©2007 Twentieth Century Fox. All rights reserved.
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