Fox Throws a Hail Mary

Are you ready for MORE football? 20th Century Fox thinks you are, as they've gone and snatched up the rights to Michael Lewis' (Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game) latest book, The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game. Released yesterday, the book garnered interest from a few other players including New Line and Mandalay. In the end, Fox won out with a deal for $200,000 against $1.5 million.

Blind Side, which revolves around the growing race for bigger (and when I say bigger, I mean BIGGER) football players, is one of several Lewis books that have been optioned over the years, with none of them moving ahead to production. However, with football as popular as it is right now on the big screen, Lewis feels this one definitely has a shot. The main plot focuses on a 16-year-old African American whose father was murdered and whose mother turned to crack. Though, at 344 pounds, the boy knew how to move and, thus, was taken in by a wealthy white couple who groomed him to be one of the top high school football prospects in the country.

Lewis notes, "Of all the books I've written, this is by far the most likely to be made into a movie." Whaddya say folks, how about we throw Eddie Murphy in a fat suit and watch this sucker fly?