When people are still talking about how funny you are more than forty years after you started, you pass the comedy test. For the members of Monty Python — the most famous British comedy group of all time — fans have been clamoring for the group to work together again since their last collaboration in 1983 (which is perhaps years before many fans were even born!) According to Variety, however, the long-awaited Python reunion might finally be pulled off!
Producer Mike Medavoy — who produced the group’s movie Life of Brian — and Python member Terry Jones — who mostly directed the group’s films — are teaming to make a sci-fi live action/CGI farce comedy, Absolutely Anything, about an earthling who is granted powers to do, well, absolutely anything, by a group of aliens just for the kicks. Jones is hoping to reunite his former crew as the voices of the aliens — with Jones and fellow Pythons John Cleese, Michael Palin, and Terry Gilliam having agreed to voice the aliens. The film also features a talking dog, Dennis, who will be voiced by Robin Williams. Williams is also in the running to play what Medavoy calls “a pompous Frenchman reminiscent of Inspector Clouseau — but there the similarity ends.”
Reunions between the five surviving Pythons — Graham Chapman having passed away in 1989 — have been few and far between, with the last time they appeared on stage together in public in 1998 (although there have been various three-member, four-member, and “hey they all happen to be in the same room” reunions since). Though the lack of reunions have usually been blamed on busy schedules, there were some rumors a few years back that bad blood between John Cleese and Eric Idle prevented future projects. Idle penned a script for a sequel to Monty Python’s Holy Grail in 1998 (cleverly, the plot of the movie revolved around the fact about how difficult it would be to reunite the troupe to make another movie), which Cleese rejected. Curiously, so far the only hold-out on Absolutely Anything is Eric Idle, who has yet to agree to terms.
Whether with four Pythons or five, the film is expected to shoot in the UK in the spring.
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