Say what you want about Twilight, but the series has already seriously impacted genre films. Much like Percy Jackson and the Secret of Harry Potter's Success, everyone's trying to cash in on Twilight's rabid fanbase, and how better to do that with a modern day remake of Beauty and the Beast? Based on the book of the same name by Alex Flinn, a new film called Beastly hits next year. The teaser trailer will likely tell you everything you need to know about it.



The film stars Alex Pettyfer, Venessa Hudgens, Mary-Kate Olsen and Neil Patrick Harris.

The synopsis of the book alone has about half a dozen stereotypical movie plots stuck together. It's about a rich, good looking popular kid named Kyle who pulls off a practical joke on a weird girl in his high school class which goes wrong. It turns out that she's a witch and so she puts a curse on him that turns him into the Beast.

She gives him two years to break the spell and like in the original story, the only way to do that is to love a girl and get her to love him to return. Kyle's father doesn't like having such an ugly, veiny kid so he locks him in his apartment and is thankful that Kyle doesn't know the phone number for child services. I'm assuming Kyle finds some girl to fall in love with him and everything turns out alright in the end, but that would just be crazy!

This paragraph from Wikipedia, however, completely killed me. It's just too good to be real.

Throughout the story, Adrian [Kyle changes his name to Adrian to fit his new persona] chats online with a support group for various transformed people. Other members are Froggie (a prince turned into a frog), SilentMaid (a mermaid trying to decide if she should sell her voice for legs to marry a sailor), and GrizzlyGuy (a man turned into a grizzly bear, as in Grimm's Snow White and Rose Red). As the story progresses, Silent Maid decides to go through with the transformation and nearly wins the sailor's heart, but ultimately loses him to another girl. Because of the deal, she will turn into sea foam but after three hundred years will go to heaven. GrizzlyGuy is turned back into a human after he meets Snow White and Rose Red and Snow White helps him kill an evil dwarf. Froggie meets a princess who agrees to kiss him after he retrieves her lost Game Boy.

Beastly hits theaters on July 30th, 2010.

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