It’s been nearly a year since we last heard from The Happytime Murders, Brian Henson’s attempt to interest audiences in the “puppets that fuck” genre pioneered by directors like Peter Jackson, Charlie Kaufman, and Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Now the movie—an R-rated comedy noir set in a world where humans and puppets uneasily co-exist—has pulled in its first big name, with Jamie Foxx in talks to appear as one of the leads.
If he takes the role, Foxx would play LAPD Detective Edwards, a clean-cut cop forced to partner with a drunken puppet private eye in order to solve a series of murders. The film is being pitched as a gritter, less family friendly turn for The Jim Henson Company, with one of the original screenwriters saying back in 2009 that Henson had told him to include “all the puppet sex, violence, and cursing you can put in there” in his script. And while that script has since been rewritten by Red writing team Jon and Erich Hoeber, it still sounds like Henson is aiming to wrack up a pretty heavy “bodily fluid removal” cleaning bill for his debauched puppet protagonists.