DreamWorks Buys Into The Museum Of SuperNatural History

I think we're now one small step closer to /Film: The Movie. There's a weird science / aliens among us / Sasquatch-spotting blog out there called The Museum of SuperNatural History, and it has just been optioned as fodder for a DreamWorks movie. The studio doesn't yet have a script or even a concrete idea of what to do with the property, but evidently the name is enough.

THR reports on the project, and says that the basic idea is to come up with a story that sounds like Men in Black with a supernatural bent. The film might follow the curator of an organization called the Museum of SuperNatural History that "must seek out and protect the world's best-kept secrets." The trade got quite a few quotes from MuSuNaHi founder Ernest Lupinacci, who said "The inherent drama, action and adventure of that mission — especially from a storytelling point of view — is that every time we shatter or even question an accepted belief, we have the potential to answer the eternal question, why are we here?" Guy definitely talks the right game. You can see why he's got a movie deal.

More than anything else, this seems like a wildly successful exercise in branding. io9 runs as many stories in a day as MuSuNaHi ran in the last quarter of 2009 but you don't see Nick Denton and Annalee Newitz spinning their science and  sci-fi corner off into a film deal. Lupinacci, a former creative director for Nike and ESPN,  more or less acknowledges the branding angle in a quote to THR, calling his blog a "trans-media brand" that he wants to be "to the paranormal world what National Geographic is to the real world." He's got the concept down, at least. The name is good and you can see people getting interested in a film based solely on that, but let's see what a screenwriter comes up with.