Director Nicholas Stoller and his Forgetting Sarah Marshall star, Jason Segel, not only delivered a solid commercial base knock ($62 million, domestically) with their spring comedy, but they also laid track for a couple future collaborations as well — including Five-Year Engagement as well as a reboot of the Muppets franchise, which the pair are writing together. “Jason had a general meeting at Disney, and at the end of the meeting they asked, ‘Are there any properties you’re interested in?'” recounts Stoller in a recent interview. “And he said, ‘Well, I’m just curious — what you’re doing with the Muppets?’ And there’s an awkward pause, and they looked at each other and said, ‘Nothing.’ And he said, ‘Well, if you do something, I’d love to be considered.’ And then they said, ‘We’d love to have you involved,’ and then Jason pulled me into the project.”
“I love the Muppets, like any comedy geek,” Stoller continues. “I call the Muppets the gateway drug to comedy; that’s what kids get into when [they’re young], that was certainly the case with me. We’re in the middle of the script right now. It’s an old-school Muppets movie, like Muppets Take Manhattan or The Great Muppet Caper. [It should be] really cool.”
