There's no real surprise here, or rather there's some amount of relief, that Robert Rodriguez has walked away from the proposed production of The Jestsons, that futuristic version of The Flintstones.

Not only that but the word was that Jim Carrey was being looked at to star in the film, and even he turned it down, a man who can make almost as bad film choices as Nicolas Cage...I said almost.

Apparently, and this is heavy rumour from one of those sources, the studio loved the script from John Altschuler and Dave Krisnky but just couldn't get it going. That's apparently down to the fact that no one that the studio approached wanted to star in the film, with the most notable of the cast names, Jim Carrey, passing on the role of George Jetson.

Now Robert Rodriguez has left the project, and quite rightly so I'd say, after all he's got a lot of other big projects, his next to tackle being Predators, so he really needs the time. Thankfully for him, as well as us, he chose Predators over The Jetsons, after all The Jetsons is just The Flintstones with dinosaurs swapped for another kids favourite, space ships.

It was a poor cartoon that really did grate and just follow a formula, so how it could have worked as a film I don't know. I guess it would have followed the films of The Flintstones just as the cartoons did, and that would mean it would be dire.

However, according to the source at Pajiba through Latino Review the film isn't dead yet - although there's no practical reason on Earth why it should go on - and a new director has been assigned, Peter Segal, the man who helmed Anger Management and Get Smart, and that would seem to work a lot better than Rodriguez.

The extra titbit is that the studio are going for a rewrite as soon as the director is on board, probably in the hope that they can make the script better and attract names to the film.

My advice is to drop the idea. A cartoon on the film sounds ridiculous unless you totally re-imagine the concept and really build up the characters, plot and script. Otherwise it's just another terrible cartoon dropped on the screen. Watch, they'll make it in 3D next.