Why was I not surprised when I checked the Google Entertainment News Wire, only to find that the latest Will Ferrell movie has suffered one of the worst opening weekends for a Ferrel movie, ever. In spite of topping the weekend box office so far, Semi-Pro has brought in just a measly $5.45 million for Friday, February 29th, with an estimated $15 million in revenue for the entire weekend. Quoting Reuters:

That would make it his worst opening since the $13.4 million start for the quirky black comedy “Stranger Than Fiction” in November 2006. But that movie opened on 2,264 theaters, while “Semi-Pro” is in 3,121 theaters.

“Blades of Glory” earned $33 million during its first weekend, and “Talladega Nights” $47 million. Both those had teen-friendly “PG-13″ ratings, while “Semi-Pro” was hampered by an “R” for language and some sexual content.

I guess it’s easy to just blame this low viewer turnout on a high MPAA rating, but I think that’s just a cop-out. I think the truth of the matter is that people are getting tired of Will Ferrell. Here’s an actor who has starred in a dozen-or-so films, yet he has played the same character in each and every one: that of an 8-year-old. And you can only watch Will Ferrell act like an 8-year-old so many time before it just isn’t funny anymore.

I have no doubt that Ferrell is just being typecast by the studios at this point. But maybe it’s time for him to fight back and stretch his abilities in a more challenging role. We don’t need another 8-year-old adult trying to entertain the audiences. That’s my job.

In an effort to help promote greater communication between members of the LTU writing staff, we’ve finally decided to move up from chiseling out messages in slabs of granite and passing them back and forth for correction. Now we carve our messages out in trees. Digital trees. Trees that are called “Google Docs.”

We now realize what an amazing application this is for coordinating groups of writers. With Google Docs, multiple people can work on the same script at the same time. Due to the increased collaboration that this offers, we’ve already started to see improvements in the quality and the overall level of humor in our script writing over the past few days. How did we ever get along without this feature?

What does this mean for you? Maybe nothing. But it does mean that you have some good shows to look forward to in the future. Episode #005 is in the works right now, and from the looks of the script, it’s going to be good. If you’re a podcaster working with a group of writers, if you need to access documents on the go, or if you’re just a nerd with nothing better to do, I can only highly recommend checking out Google Docs.