Pez candy will come to life as an animated movie

Further evidence that Hollywood will leverage any recognizable brand available to attract moviegoers’ attention has arrived in the form of a Pez film project.

Envision Media Arts is developing an animated movie based on the plastic candy dispensers with cartoony heads and has enlisted screenwriter Cameron Fay to pen the script, the company announced Monday.

Fay’s credits include the upcoming comedies “The Three Stooges Movie” and “Brother in Laws.” Lee Nelson and David Buelow (“Celeste and Jesse Forever”) are producing the Pez project.

No details have been provided about the plot of the potential movie, and the dispensers themselves don’t come with much of a built-in story. Created in Austria in 1927 as breath mints loaded into dispensers resembling cigarette lighters, Pez came to the U.S. in the 1950s and added the now-familiar fruit flavors and toy character heads.

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It’s unclear whether the Pez movie would feature original characters, licensed ones or a combination of the two. The latter approach worked like gangbusters for “The Lego Movie,” the Warner Bros. blockbuster that has sparked renewed interest in films based on familiar, often non-narrative intellectual property. Other examples include a Barbie movie (currently being rewritten by Diablo Cody), a Peeps movie and an emoji movie.

One can’t help but wonder, though, just what a Pez movie could be about and what it would look like. Even if the dispensers have recognizable faces (and rudimentary feet), they don’t have arms, which could limit the action somewhat. There’s also the whole thing about cute cartoons ejecting candy from their necks.

In the announcement, Nelson pledged “a world unique to Pez and a story that will touch the hearts of many.”

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