A few years ago, it looked like Tim Burton would direct Jim Carrey in a film based on Ripley's Believe It Or Not (the $175 million flick even had the greenlight), now known as a chain of museums featuring weird and wonderful objects, but which started out as a newspaper column, about the strange and unusual things going on around the world. However it appeared the idea quietly got dropped, but that isn't quite true, as while the Burton movie may not have gone ahead, the idea hasn't died.
Now Deadline reports that Paramount has set Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, Benjamin Button), to do a complete overhaul of the screenplay, presumably taking into account the major changes Carrey suggested, which everyone liked but which ended up derailing the momentum of the film when Tim Burton was involved (although since then a Chris Columbus directed version has stalled too).
Apparently, 'the film is about Ripley's search around the world for the most unusual people and places that he immortalized in his newspaper column. The locales were exotic and the sights were unbelievable, but the film is about Ripley's journey to appreciate that the unusual people were more than just conquests to be cataloged.'
Carrey is still attached, but as yet there' no director.