This image was lost some time after publication.

Realizing that the millions of purchasers of the shopping-mall-quality artwork of Thomas "The Painter of Light" Kinkade who spend their weekend nights avoiding the multiplex in favor of staying home to stare contentedly at the quaint tableaux upon which they've just spent hundred of dollars represent an untapped market for their cinematic product, the visionary executives of Lionsgate have announced that they're adapting Kinkade's "The Christmas Cottage" painting into a feature to be released around the holidays, according to Variety.

While the project will reportedly be "partly biographical," Lionsgate expects that audience testing will result in the boring details of the painter's life being expunged from the film, with a final cut consisting of nothing more than a single, 90-minute-long shot of the snow-blanketed abode slightly enhanced by subtle CGI highlighting (no two showings will be exactly the same!), which will allow theatergoers to imagine their own satisfying, idealistic Christmas tale unfolding within the cottage's cozy confines. Should this bold experiment into nontraditional source material pay off as handsomely as expected, the studio plans to quickly adapt the work of other massively popular and accesible artists, starting with a big-screen treatment of Bob Ross' Happy Little Tree, Fluffy Little Cloud, which could hit theaters as early as March of 2008.

[Image: KinkadeCentral.com]