First, a brief history of corporate synergy: Disney took a huge gamble adapting Pirates of the Caribbean into a film, the ride is an iconic part of Disney's theme park empire but it's not a terribly excited ride and the most iconic image you could pluck from it was a dog holding a pair of keys, which they used up in the first film. That said, the gamble worked and the first movie was a massive success both critically and financially. The sequels saw the balance shift further and further towards the financial, but a success is a success.
Disney have not given up on this apparently lucrative strategy, attempting to adapt The Haunted Mansion into a film and failing miserably by turning it into an Eddie Murphy vehicle. They plan to try again with Guillermo Del Toro at the helm, however that may never happen because Del Toro is also busy developing 500 other ideas.
The next idea was to adapt the Matterhorn ride, until they began to change the idea to such an extent that they dropped all connections to the ride and hired Ehren Krueger to pen the screenplay, thus dropping all connections to quality writing.
There is still talk of Disney producing their own version of Night at the Museum, set inside The Magic Kingdom, called... The Magic Kingdom. That seems like the apex of this idea, rendering any other attempt redundant. Disney don't know the meaning of the word redundant; they made a sequel to Tron, remember?
Mr. Toad's Wild Ride could quite easily be wrapped up in their Magic Kingdom idea but, of all the Disney rides, the Wild Ride is the most famous outside of Pirates and It's a Small World (please don't turn this one into a movie, Disney!), so it stands the best chance of drawing a crowd. Music video director Pete Candeland will direct, but no writer has been attached yet, as screenplays are not a priority for Disney.
Of course, this isn't the first time Mr. Toad's Wild Ride has been used to market a movie; Terry Jones' misguided adaptation of The Wind in the Willows was sold as Mr. Toad's Wild Ride for US video release. This, however, will be a movie explicitly based on the ride.
This whole idea seems thoroughly back-asswards, given the fact that Mr. Toad's Wild Ride is based on a sequence from Disney's The Wind in The Willows adaptation, which is an adaptation of the famous novel by Kenneth Grahame. So we are now getting adaptations of adaptations of adaptations. Any more levels and we'll have Mr. Toad plummeting into Limbo.
The ride was also a popular feature of Walt Disney World Florida, but closed down in 1998, to be replaced by The Many Adventures Of Winnie The Pooh. I won't lie, as a life long fan of the Bear of Very Little Brain, I like that ride. Maybe they can adapt that into a movie!
Source: Deadline
