The fine bloggers over at the Playlist keep trying to calm us down about Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are, but all they do is make us more upset every day. Now they've checked out an Entertainment Weekly report — weirdly, the report is not online, although we did find a possible version on a message board — that the production is "deeply troubled" and that screenwriter Jon Vitti has been hired to punch up the script. Vitti's last screenplay, of course, was the deathless Alvin and the Chipmunks.

Why all the panic on the part of the studio? EW speculates that Warner Bros. might be especially sensitive to floppy, expensive kids' movies thanks to their brutal experience with Speed Racer. If the Wachowski Brothers' seizure-inducing epic had not failed so badly, the thinking goes, Warner Bros. would be less inclined to rewrite and recut a children's movie that some claim terrifies actual children. (Naturally, a Warners source assures EW that isn't the case.) We still hope Spike Jonze's original version comes out, and moreover we hope it is terrifying to children — how great would it be if the movie's release were accompanied by the laying out of tarps in theaters, to remedy the epidemic of pants-wetting the ferocious Wild Things cause among the nation's youth?

'Wild Things' Update [Playlist]

Earlier: Hey Warners! Leave Spike Jonze and ‘Wild Things’ Alone!
We've Got Dave Eggers's and Spike Jonze's Script for ‘Where the Wild Things Are’