Hey, remember when everybody went apeshit over The Chainsmokers last summer? Specifically that song ‘Paris’?
Well, the Chainsmokers themselves do, and according to the Hollywood Reporter, they want to turn that song into a movie with the help of Mickey Rapin, the writer behind the book that the Pitch Perfect franchise was based on. The musical duo has set up a production company — the newly christened Kick the Habit Productions — and Rapin is looking to begin penning the screenplay soon.
Either you’re excited by this prospective project or you’re going to hate it, much like everything The Chainsmokers do, and honestly, we have no clue how to feel about this. It’s a very slow news day, and the movie-based-on-a-song thing intrigued us. And guess what? That little subgenre is actually pretty cool!
The film-based-on-song genre was hugely popular back in the Silent Era, given that the song itself typically accompanied it without many rights issues, given that the nature of copyright was, well, pretty different back then, and remained an occasional mainstay on theater screens throughout the rest of the century. You’ve got your fair share of ’60s classics — Yellow Submarine, Alice’s Restaurant — and your ’80s curiosities — the Sly Stallone/Dolly Parton comedy Rhinestone, Hot Jeff Goldblum in Earth Girls are Easy, and the utterly bizarre Neil Patrick Harris vehicle Purple People Eater (featuring creature and all).
It fell out of favor in the ’90s, and the genre hasn’t really seen a new American entry in a number of years, though it’s remained popular in places like Japan and in mainland China (where there was a “Bad Romance” movie released back in 2011 based on the Lady Gaga song of the same name). So this “Paris” movie is joining a long and proudly odd tradition and, in all honesty, it’s probably going to be garbage. That’s never stopped anybody before, though!
No word on a release date, but we’re convinced that it’ll hit theaters near you before the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies merge into one in some four-to-eight billion years.
Featured Chainsmokers image by Matthew Shelter for Vanyaland, from their 2016 Kiss Concert appearance.