Imagine the streets of New York City quaking. The bright screens high above Times Square vibrate and begin to fall to the ground with a crushing crescendo. “Dear god, no!” scream those below, ducking under any protection they can find as chunks of debris and white fluff fall all around them. Then it is still. Unnervingly still. Everyone freezes in silence, petrified still until one small piece of cottony white fuzz slowly falls. A man in an Equinox trainer t-shirt stares at it in horror. He tries to hold his breath but it is too late. The fuzz lands on his nose and out comes a wet, booming sneeze. It has awakened it. It has awakened… Hello Kitty. The cartoon cat suddenly appears from behind a building, eyes glowing red with evil, and it lets out an earth-shattering scream from behind its spiked teeth. Everyone is doomed.
This could be what you see in theaters sometime soon, as Hello Kitty, the movie, has been commissioned by production company New Line, to be written by Lindsay Beer, who penned Masters of the Universe, Transformers: The Last Knight, and also worked on Godzilla Vs. Kong and Star Trek. Considering what has happened to several beloved childhood franchises of late, we’ve mapped out a few possible directions for the iconic Sanrio character.
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Beer could, for example, may give the adorable illustrated kitten, known for her cute pink overalls, a weirdly sexy makeover in the style of Dora the Explorer. Recall, when Dora was aged up to a tween, her little moppy bowl cut was transformed into a silky blow out, and she got some lip gloss and accessories to match her cute new top-and-leggings look. Beer might want to put Hello Kitty in coochie cutters, a crop top, and platforms, and send her on an adventure to find her phone after she lost it somewhere between the Lower East Side karaoke bar she and Kero Kero Keroppi started at and the Staten Island single dad’s house she ended at, and that would be, well, a choice.
Then there’s the possibility that the makeover CGI Hello Kitty does get is messed up as hell, similar to the one Sonic the Hedgehog got. When the first trailer for the Sonic the Hedgehog movie dropped, fans were extremely upset by the character’s design; specifically, by his honking blocks of Chiclet teeth that made him look like he was wearing dentures. The outrage was loud enough that the film’s director Jeff Fowler announced that Paramount and Sega, the studios behind the film, would be redesigning the character. If Hello Kitty shows up on screen with Kylie Jenner lips, a set of fangs, or a super long Gene Simmons-esque tongue that she waves around at Pochacco, it will certainly leave many angry and more than mildly freaked out.
If Beers is smart, though, she’ll consult the world’s biggest Hello Kitty aficionado, a woman so deeply entrenched in the Sanrio universe she has an entire Hello Kitty-themed bathroom, plus once provided a tour of her Hello Kitty kitchen on a legendary episode of MTV Cribs (where she also used a Stairmaster in heels, took a bath in front of the cameras, and her dog attacked her cat). She needs to pick up a Hello Kitty-shaped phone and call Mariah Carey! Mariah knows what a Hello Kitty world must look like to be true to its soul. She could even sing the film’s theme, which could be titled something like “Feline Cute” or “Don’t Be Kitten With My Love” or “Honey Paw-lease” or “ImPAWssible Love” and feature DJ Khaled. We the pets music! This could be a great film, but she needs the right person behind her, an elusive chanteuse with a Hello Kitty heart. Or just cast Mariah as Hello Kitty, in a big, furry mascot costume. She could be the Meryl Streep of playing kittens.
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