General Mills’ monster cereal characters may become movie stars

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

Every year, General Mills' monster cereals come creeping into your local grocery store, tempting shoppers with the cartoony creatures on the box, their delicious flavors, the ghost-shaped cereal pieces, and bat-shaped marshmallows. There's the vampire Count Chocula and his chocolate cereal; the ghostly BooBerry, whose cereal is blueberry flavored; and (my personal favorite) the strawberry flavored cereal of pink Frankenstein's Monster FrankenBerry. Occasionally that trio is accompanied by the Fruity Yummy Mummy and the werewolf Fruit Brute, and the most recent incarnations of those cereals were orange cream and cherry flavored, respectively.

Many fans of horror and of the Halloween season stock up on those cereals every October… but in coming years, the cereal aisle may not be the only place you'll find those monsters.

General Mills has launched the website WorkWithTheMonsters.com, seeking out anyone in the entertainment industry who may be interested in telling stories about their monsters.

The site says: 

We’re calling all filmmakers, actors, agents, writers, producers, animators, tastemakers, dealmakers, movers and shakers. We want to work with you to bring great stories to life. From mythical fables to magical journeys. Fairy tales to folk tales. Cliffhangers to nail-biters. Heroic sagas to cosmic battles. Binge-worthy dramas to historical epics. Blockbusters to indies. Serials to sequels. Together, let’s captivate the hearts and minds of teens and adults.

This isn’t a contest. This isn’t a pitch for free ideas. We humbly submit this brief to you, Hollywood.

Anyone with a Count Chocula, BooBerry, FrankenBerry, Fruity Yummy Mummy, or Fruit Brute idea they would like to pitch to General Mills will first have to fill out a form on the website. Once their credentials are verified, they will then have the chance to send their pitch to the company, after which the idea will be evaluated by "the General Mills Creative Director, Producer and a select group of award-winning directors and writers."

The site gives a summary of how this will work:

You retain rights to what you pitch (except that you don’t have any rights to The Monsters). If we decide it’s something that deserves to see the light of day, we’ll work out all the details with you. Including money. That said, stuff happens. When you submit your pitch, you’re going to be acknowledging that a lot of ideas are pretty similar (or even pretty generic – like a buddy cop theme or “fish out of water” angle).  So we’re going to reserve the rights to produce similar ideas without you. That’s just the business of ideas. We’ll ask you to click through a whole bunch of terms our lawyers put together to keep us all honest. Please read them. 

General Mills is looking to "establish a long working partnership with the best talent in the business", so the future is bright for their fruity and chocolatey monsters.

I'm very curious to see what kind of projects are going to come out of this initiative. Quentin Tarantino featured a box of Fruit Brute in PULP FICTION, maybe he has an idea for a werewolf who loves fruit.