Thomas the Tank Engine Gets the Hollywood Reboot You Always Wanted

Growing up, we weren't kids who played with trains. Frankly, we don't get it: They're big, boxy, old things. We have a seven-year-old nephew who loves 'em, but even that's not enough to convince us. Geez, they don't even transform into robots.

In particular, our nephew used to love Thomas the Tank Engine, who has been around for about 65 years and was created by Wilbert Awdry for a series of books. Thomas is a train engine with a face on the front of it. He's been very popular for a long time, mostly on a long-running kids' TV show called "Thomas and Friends." It's a British show that also runs on PBS under the name "Shining Time Station." George Carlin was on the show for a while. Did you know any of this? If you don't have kids in your life, you probably did not.

The point of all this is that there's going to be a Thomas the Tank Engine movie directed by Shane Acker, the man behind the moody, adult-oriented 2009 animated film "9." Interestingly, though, this won't be an animated movie: Hit Entertainment, who owns the rights to Thomas, is going the live-action route for the film. And in case you're worried that Acker will turn Thomas dark, he swore to Deadline that won't happen:

"The tale will revolve around a pre-teen boy who has drifted apart from his father. The son is introduced into this world of Sodor, a place his father visited as a child but can't remember. There is a bonding experience."

Sodor is where Thomas hangs out with his talking-train buddies. (We hope our sister is impressed with how much of this stuff we actually retained.)

The one thing that Deadline's story gets wrong is that this isn't actually the "first live action theatrical film" of Thomas. How quickly we forget "Thomas and the Magic Railroad," which came out in 2000 and was written and directed by Britt Allcroft, who also created the original British TV series. "Thomas and the Magic Railroad" performed very poorly, and critics didn't love it either. We can understand why. People always complain that there aren't enough wholesome family movies out there, and then one comes along, and it ends up looking like this:

'9' Helmer Shane Acker Boards Feature Based On The Thomas The Tank Engine Toys [Deadline]