I shit you not:

[Universal Studios] picked up the movie rights to the popular children’s books series from Classic Media with the aim of making a live-action family film to be produced by Chris Meledandri’s Illumination Entertainment.

…
The books began life in the U.K. in the late 1980s, where he is called Wally, before becoming a worldwide sensation. The books became more thematically complex, with Waldo traveling in time or landing in supernatural settings, and a nemesis was introduced, an anti-Waldo named Odlaw.

The book series was previously set up at Paramount and Nickelodeon, where John Schultz was attached to direct a script that had been worked on by scribes such as Adam Rifkin as well as Adam Cooper and Bill Collage.

The plot of that project revolved around Waldo, now 30, ending up traveling through time after accidentally activating a malfunctioning travel machine.

Paramount recently put the project in turnaround, and the rights to “Waldo” have been bouncing around between entities.

Several studios were in the running for the rights, but over the course of several months, Meledandri spearheaded the push to bring it to Universal, where Illumination is based.

-THR

Really?! “Several studios were in the running for the rights,”?!

Hollywood. Stop. First, news about a movie based on gum, now a movie based on a PICTURE BOOK!? I would imagine that there are literally 100’s or 1000’s of up and coming writers out there with good, original ideas that deserve to be made into movies, but instead, studios are going to war over the rights to gum and picture books.

Awesome. Way to go.