“Saturday Night Live” superstar comedian Kate McKinnon (Ghostbusters, Office Christmas Party) has signed on to star in Amblin Entertainment’s The Lunch Witch. According to , the live-action film will be directed by Clay Kaytis (The Angry Birds Movie) and produced by De Luca Productions, with Michael De Luca and executive producer Johnny Pariseau spearheading the project. No screenwriter has been announced yet, but the film will be based on the 2015 children’s novel of the same name by Deb Lucke.
The logline for the project is a simple one: a witch becomes a school lunch lady, terrorizes students, but ultimately befriends an outcast kid. There’s a lot of fun to be had with such a premise and I have little doubt that McKinnon will knock her role out of the park as the titular witch. Amblin Entertainment’s involvement adds an extra lair of fun to the proceedings, as it sounds exactly like something that founder Steven Spielberg might have produced back in the 1980s. That goes double if you actually read the book’s synopsis (per Amazon)…
For generations and generations, the women of Grunhilda’s family have stirred up trouble in a big, black pot. Grunhilda inherits her famous ancestors’ recipes and cauldron, but no one believes in magic anymore. Despite the fact that Grunhilda’s only useful skill is cooking up potfuls of foul brew, she finds a job listing that might suit her: lunch lady. She delights in scaring the kids until she meets Madison, a girl with thick glasses and unfinished homework who doesn’t fit in. The two outsiders recognize each other. Madison needs help at school and at home, but helping people goes against everything Grunhilda’s believes in as a witch! Will this girl be able to thaw the Lunch Witch’s icy heart? Or will Grunhilda turn her back on a kindred spirit?
That sounds like a good slice o’ darkly-tinged fantasy fun to me. Digging deeper into the property on the novel side of things, it appears to be the first in a series of books. The second novel, The Lunch Witch: Knee-deep in Kindness, was published back in October. Might this become a franchise for both McKinnon and Amblin? If all turns out well, I certainly hope so, especially if it retains that slightly harder edge that classic Amblin kids films often had (i.e. Gremlins, The Goonies, Young Sherlock Holmes, etc.).
Witches seem to be all the rage right now, so a franchise isn’t outside the realm of possibility. This year alone saw the release of films such as The Witch, Blair Witch, and The Love Witch, as well the continued existence of TV shows such as WGN’s supremely underrated “Salem” and Hallmark’s infinitely more wholesome “The Good Witch“. All in all, the broomstick-riding, magic-brewing mythological ladies are seeing a large resurgence in the media. As someone who loves both witches and variety in his genre entertainment, I couldn’t be happier. Here’s hoping that The Lunch Witch turns out to be a winner and yet another feather in McKinnon’s cap.
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Elizabeth