As timeless at The Three Stooges were, their movies didn’t really have enough masturbation or funny disabled people in them.

But that’s all going to change! Why? Because there’s going to be a new Three Stooges movie coming out next year, and it’s going to a) be set in the modern world, b) partially feature The Three Stooges as children and c) be written and directed by The Farrelly Brothers.

Leaving aside the fact that it’ll probably end up starring Ben Stiller, Jack Black and Jimmy Fallon, it’s quite hard to understand why The Farrelly Brothers are even making a new movie based on The Three Stooges in the first place. After all, it’ll probably be much cheaper to train a monkey to rub its own poo across the gravestones of the old Three Stooges, wouldn’t it?

We all know how in vogue belated sequels are, with everyone from Bruce Willis to Steven Seagal revisiting their former glories. But, you see, the one advantage that Bruce Willis and Steven Seagal have over a group like The Three Stooges is that, despite their appearances, they haven’t been dead for almost 35 years.

The original members of The Three Stooges are all long gone, a sad fact that’s either down to them spending their entire professional careers clonking each other on the head as hard as possible or them being born over 100 years ago. But, whatever the reason, they’re gone.

However, a little thing like unequivocal death isn’t going to stop Hollywood from making money out of The Three Stooges, even if it has to hire a couple of past-it directors like The Farrelly Brothers to make it happen, as Reuters reports:

The Farrellys’ screenplay breaks the feature into four 20-minute shorts, in an approximation of the vaudeville and slapstick pioneers’ most common format in the 1920s and ’30s. The first episode establishes the bruising, boisterous brothers as 7-year-old castoffs who terrorize the nun-run orphanage that takes them in. Eventually forced to leave, Moe, Larry and Curly try to find a place for themselves in a modern world.

To be honest, it doesn’t matter that The Farrelly Brothers rebirth of The Three Stooges will be a hopeless disaster, because that’s sort of the tradition when it comes to The Three Stooges rebirths. For instance, the Mel Gibson-produced 2000 TV movie about The Three Stooges was even more depressing than Radiohead soundtracking a documentary about decaying meat, and the 1987 Amiga 500 game The Three Stooges wasn’t much better.

So maybe The Farrelly Brothers can surprise us with their new Three Stooges movie. After all, if they can combine the knockabout humour of Dumb And Dumber with the touching sweetness of Shallow Hal, while adding a touch of the romance from that Jonas Brother film about the farting dog, then we’re sure that they’ll create a movie that… no, we can’t do it. This film’s going to be awful.