EXCLUSIVE: On the first episode of Deadline’s Crew Call podcast since the Emmy nominations, Wednesday creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar reveal that they’re working on a new animated Addams Family movie for Amazon MGM Studios, which is a complete reboot and not connected with the Netflix series about the psychic, deadpan Wednesday Addams played by Emmy and Golden Globe nominee Jenna Ortega.
Gough tells Crew Call: “We’re working on it with Amazon MGM and with Kevin Miserocchi who runs the Addams Foundation, he knew Charles Addams and the keeper of the Addams flame, and with Gail Berman and John Glickman. We’re rebooting the animated film franchise. So it won’t have anything to do with the two films before it, nor is it connected with this show. It will be a brand new Addams feature. There’s not really much we can say about it, because it’s in the very early stages.”
The aim is for the project to hit the big screen.
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Gough and Millar tell us about how they first partnered up and kept that creative collaboration intact from their days at the USC Peter Stark Producing Program, where they first cracked an orangutan and cop buddy movie, Mango, and sold it to Michael De Luca at New Line, all the way through to their days co-writing for the now Warner Bros boss on the near half-billion-grossing Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
The duo tell us about how they cracked Season 2 of Wednesday which was disrupted by the writers and actors strikes, their inspirations, the staying power of the Addams Family franchise, and what the trick is to getting inside Wednesday’s head as she throws around sardonic one-liners like she’s Groucho Marx.
Says Gough, “The key with her is not writing a joke, it’s writing to her world view. That’s where it lands, and that’s where it sounds fun. Anytime you reach for a joke with this character, you wind up cutting that line.”
Also, Wednesday isn’t your run-of-the-mill girl detective — she’s no Veronica Mars. She commits to solving the crime “because someone has gaslighted her, or because she feels a truth isn’t being told, she also sticks up for the underdog,” says Gough.
“Wednesday came in fully formed,” says Gough about the character’s approach to a young-adult sphere. “And she has to learn that the world works in shades of grey.”
Here’s our conversation below: