Jennifer Lawrence and Emma Stone are making a Miss Piggy movie, it’s about time

It is about time Miss Piggy got the proper big screen treatment befitting of her icon status.

After all, this is a star who once described herself as “fabulousity with a dash of irresistibility and a great big dollop of attitude”. We concur.

Kermit might have the distinction of being the only crossover character between The Muppets and Sesame Street (thanks, The West Wing, for that bit of trivia), but Miss Piggy has always upstaged her amphibious lover.

Kermit is also not getting his own movie to be made by the highly impressive trio of Jennifer Lawrence, Emma Stone and Cole Escola.

Lawrence revealed the project was in the works on the La Culturistas podcast, and added that she and Stone will likely appear onscreen in the film as well as producing it.

The two Oscar-winning actors are no strangers to mainstream audiences, but Escola, who uses they/them pronouns, might be a lesser-known name among Australians.

They are an actor, writer and singer who has made memorable appearances on shows such as Difficult People, Search Party and Fantasmas. They are also a fixture in the New York theatre scene and recently broke out in a big way for writing and starring in the Broadway sensation Oh, Mary, in which they played Mary Todd Lincoln.

Escola won a Tony Award for the role and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play is a spoof set in the days leading up to Abraham Lincoln’s assassination and imagined Mary Todd Lincoln as a former cabaret star.

Escola’s creative sensibilities for dramatic flair is a perfect fit for the character of Miss Piggy, who has never before been the solo star of her own film. She had an eponymous one-hour TV variety special in 1982, but this is on another level.

The legendary Jim Henson created The Muppets in 1955, originally as a short-form series called Sam and Friends. Miss Piggy didn’t come along until 1974 when she appeared on a TV special for musician Herb Alpert.

When The Muppet Show launched in 1976, Miss Piggy adopted her signature look and her irreverent diva behaviour. She was a massive hit to the point that in 1979, she graced the cover of People magazine, which ran an interview with, not about, the fictional character.

The publication opened its article with, “A sunburst blonde lolls on lavender satin sheets. Her mouth is large, scarlet, half-open, her blank blue eyes smoulder like sapphires in candlelight”.

During the late 1970s and 1980s, Miss Piggy outsold the other Muppets characters in merchandise, and a book, Miss Piggy’s Guide to Life, entered the New York Times bestseller list.

When The Muppet Movie was released in 1979, it grossed $US65 million, the equivalent of almost $US300 million today.

From 1976 to 2000, Frank Oz was the performer behind Miss Piggy until he left The Muppets enterprise.

Oz’s parents had been puppeteers in Antwerp before they left Europe when he was five. He picked up the art of performing in his teens in San Francisco, and met Henson when he was 19.

Henson died in 1990 at the age of 53 from toxic shock syndrome, but Oz told The Guardian in 2021 that it was stress over an impending acquisition deal with Disney which contributed to his death.

“The Disney deal is probably what killed Jim. It made him sick. Eisner was trying to get Sesame Street too, which Jim wouldn’t allow. But Jim was not a dealer, he was an artist, and it was destroying him, it really was,” Oz said.

Henson didn’t have a love for puppeteering so much as he wanted to work in TV. According to The Smithsonian magazine, he said in 1985, “I love television and I wanted to work in it, and I heard a television station there was looking for a puppeteer. I made some puppets and got a job.”

Disney didn’t end up with the rights to The Muppets until 2004, more than a decade after initial negotiations. It has been in the House of Mouse library ever since, and has been trotted out variously over the past two decades including a reboot film in 2011 co-written by and starring Jason Segel, and Miss Piggy appeared at King Charles’s coronation concert in 2023.

Oz was less of a fan of the Disney era of The Muppets, and said “there’s an inability for corporate America to understand the value of something they bought, they never understood us.”

With the 50th anniversary of The Muppet Show next year, Disney is reviving it for a special from Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s production house. It’s slated to guest star Sabrina Carpenter, someone Miss Piggy will surely approve of.