Raise your paper crown. Yesterday, October 8, Deadline reported that Paramount Pictures is in early development on a live-action, four-quadrant family comedy based on Medieval Times — yes, the dinner theater. The director of the Weird Al Yankovic biopic is making a movie about eating turkey legs with your hands while knights joust. Hollywood has finally run out of excuses, and honestly? This sounds fantastic.
The logline that sells itself
Here’s the official logline, and it’s doing serious heavy lifting: a struggling employee at the Orlando Medieval Times accidentally unleashes a real 9th-century knight — along with an ancient evil necromancer — and has to team up with the feral warrior to save the castle, then the world, and finally win the respect he’s always craved.
Read that again. A real knight. An evil necromancer. An Orlando dinner theater employee who has to save the world to earn his coworkers’ respect. That’s not a pitch; that’s a promise. The genius is in the structure: it keeps the thing everyone knows — the jousting, the horses, the eating with your hands — and bolts a fantasy adventure onto it. Night at the Museum energy with lances.
The perfect people for this
Directing is Eric Appel, who made Weird: The Al Yankovic Story — a film that took the most ridiculous premise imaginable and turned it into one of the funniest movies of its year. Appel’s gift is playing absurdity completely straight, which is exactly what this project needs. A Medieval Times movie only works if everyone involved commits like it’s Shakespeare.
Writing is Blaise Hemingway, who co-wrote Weird with Appel and also penned 2021’s Clifford the Big Red Dog. That combination — a comedian’s instincts plus a proven family-film track record — is the ideal recipe for a “four-quadrant family comedy,” studio-speak for a movie grandparents and grandkids enjoy together. The director-writer pairing, veterans of the same comic sensibility, suggests this came together as a genuine package rather than a committee assignment.
A brand 40 years in the making
For the uninitiated: Medieval Times opened its first North American location in Florida in 1983, and there are now ten venues across the United States and Canada. You sit in a stadium, eat rustic food with no silverware, and cheer for color-coded knights on real horses jousting for your honor. If you grew up in America, you’ve seen the commercials roughly six thousand times.
The brand’s biggest pop-culture moment remains The Cable Guy (1996), where Jim Carrey’s unhinged installer drags Matthew Broderick’s character to the restaurant and somehow gets them both inserted into the show. The idea of a full Medieval Times movie isn’t new, either — the rights were actually sold back in 2013, and that version never materialized. Sometimes the best ideas need a decade to find their people.
And the people are there. Family spectacle is having a real moment — Universal Studios Hollywood’s biggest holiday season yet is built on the same principle: families will pay to watch something spectacular together. This movie is that instinct with a screenplay.
Why this will work
The last few years taught Hollywood that the weirder the IP, the better — as long as the filmmakers love it. Barbie was a toy commercial directed by Greta Gerwig. The Lego Movie was a toy commercial directed by geniuses. A Medieval Times movie works on the same principle: the brand is a Trojan horse for whatever the filmmakers actually want to make, which in this case appears to be a fish-out-of-water fantasy comedy with real heart.
The Orlando setting is a lovely touch, too. Not a generic castle — the actual Orlando Medieval Times, the flagship, where tourists in fanny packs can become heroes. There’s something deeply American about the whole thing: the most European fantasy imaginable, filtered through a Florida parking lot. Appel will know exactly what to do with that.
What comes next
Early development means no cast, no production date, no release window. The milestones to watch: casting (the knight and the employee are star-making roles), and whether Paramount fast-tracks this for a holiday or summer slot. Family comedies with fantasy elements tend to get prime real estate, and this one has four-quadrant written all over it.
If you’re near one of the ten castles, consider this your sign to go. In a few years you’ll want to say you were there before the movie. Huzzah.
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