Paramount Players has acquired the feature film rights to Creepy Crawlers, the famous toy brand owned by JAKKS Pacific, sources tell Variety.
Neal H. Moritz will produce with Marc Gurvitz and Toby Ascher. Stephen Berman, chairman and CEO of JAKKS, will serve as executive producer.
Plot details are unknown at this time, but the film will be based on the classic toy molds of all sorts of creepy and slimy bugs. Originally developed by Mattel in the early ’60s, the toy was revitalized by ToyMax in the ’90s, allowing children to create their own molds again, like the Creeple Peeple and Eeeks.
JAKKS has taken over for the past decade and, while re-using some of the old favorites, have progressed to creating molds of classic cartoon characters like Spongebob Squarepants and Pokemon.
Ali Bell and Royce Reeves-Darby will be overseeing for Paramount Players.
Paramount, as a whole, has found success in recent years in taking popular toys like Transformers and G.I. Joe and turning them into film franchises. The studio hopes to have similar results with this latest IP.
Known more for his action and comedy series like “Fast and Furious” and “21 Jump Street,” Moritz has also seen success as of late in the family-friendly realm after adapting the popular kids’ book series “Goosebumps” into a franchise at Sony. The studio is currently prepping the sequel, which will open in 2019.
