'Ted' follows 'Beaver,' giving Hollywood a second stuffed animal movie

By Sarah Sluis

It's not unusual in Hollywood to see two films with similar ideas release within a year of each other. Scripts are passed around. People make pitches to multiple studios. Before you know it, someone who passed on a script sees it go into development�and worries they made the wrong decision. Quick! Let's make a movie about volcanoes (Dante's Peak/Volcano), animated insects (A Bug's Life/Antz), asteroids hitting the Earth (Armageddon/Deep Impact), or sea creatures (Shark Tale/Finding Nemo). And those are just the most egregious examples. Little bits of plot or characters or situations often appear in waves. It's one thing to riff on a successful part of a movie, but it's another thing to see studios developing a similar project concurrently. It feels a little bit like encroaching on someone else's intellectual property.

On Monday, it was announced that Universal is acquiring a hard-R comedy by "Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane called Ted, about a man and his teddy bear. This project sounds remarkably similar to a movie that just wrapped called The Beaver, which is about a man (Mel Gibson) who walks around with a beaver puppet on his hand that he treats like a living creature. The movie was at the top of the Black List of unproduced screenplays in 2008 (meaning everyone in Hollywood read it and liked it), and some time after pulled together its starry cast (Jodie Foster is directing and co-starring)

Some important differences: Ted will be a mixture of live action and CG, with MacFarlane voicing Ted. This means the audience will hear the voice of the stuffed animal, making it more real. As far as I know, the beaver in the other movie doesn't talk. Even if Ted the teddy bear is a delusion or an imaginary voice, the audience will have access to it and it will create a much different feel. A hard-R comedy is also quite different from a quieter black comedy with some drama in it, which is my impression of The Beaver.

Still, two movies about adults with stuffed animal companions? It's the kind of story idea that's so weird it takes a while to warm up to, but once you do, you kind of like it....and you're not the only one. While I hope it ends here, I will be on the lookout for the third stuffed animal-related project.