So, Thor is finally coming to the big screen. However, don’t start swinging your enchanted hammers just yet, Marvel fans, for we’re not talking about the Norse God of Thunder, but instead the wonderfully-named director, Thor Freudenthal, who has just signed a deal to direct his first movie, They Came From Upstairs, for 20th Century Fox.
The German-born Freudenthal, who made his name via a series of commercials and a short movie called Motel which played at Sundance, has been brought onto the family comedy by producer, Barry Josephson.
A sort of We Are Not (Home) Alone, if you will, They Came From Upstairs is a family comedy that concerns the efforts of a group of children to repel an alien invasion in their Maine summer home. The title refers to the origin of the alien incursion: from, you guessed it, upstairs.
Of course, there’s every chance that They Came From Upstairs could be just another harmless kid-com that should merit barely a blip on your reader radar, but we’re quietly optimistic about this, and not just because we believe that we should live in a world where every director is called Thor, or Brick, or Hammer.
No, there’s a fair bit of pedigree behind this – the screenwriter, Mark Burton, is a Brit who contributed to the scripts of Madagascar, and Aardman’s Chicken Run and Wallace & Gromit: Curse Of The Were-Rabbit, so he clearly knows his way around a gag or two. We’ll ignore the fact, for the sake of boundless positivity, that he also wrote dreadful Jim Broadbent sitcom, The Peter Principle, and the TV version of Mike Bassett: England Manager.
Meanwhile, Freudenthal’s style has been compared to Barry Sonnenfeld – thankfully, that’s Men In Black era Sonnenfeld, so we could be in for a sly and funny visual treat. Freude… heck, we’ll just call him The Mighty Thor, has been attached to other projects, including a thriller for Luc Besson with the brilliant title, Dead Ever After, but it looks like They Came From Upstairs will be The Mighty Thor's first mission on this fragile earth. As ever, more news when we get it…