A Deadly Adoption on Lifetime: Twitter reacts
To celebrate its 25th anniversary of making movies, Lifetime premiered Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig’s once-secret A Deadly Adoption on Saturday night. “I don’t know if we’ll ever know whether it was a bet from a group of friends or he really wanted to do it,” Tanya Lopez, A+E Networks senior VP of original movies, told EW. “We weren’t clear if it was going to be authentic, if it really was going to be this murder story. […] It’s not a comedy. And it’s well-done.”
Lopez wasn’t kidding: The intentional laughs are scarce in A Deadly Adoption, which focuses on a small-town couple (Ferrell and Wiig) and the pregnant woman (Jessica Lowndes) whose child they hope to adopt. Ferrell and Wiig play things straight down the middle in the film, which was executive produced by Ferrell and Adam McKay and directed by Rachel Goldenberg.
“It’s not the Scary Movie parody of a Lifetime movie. He wanted to legitimately do a Lifetime sexual thriller,” Arturo Interian, VP of original movies, said to EW.
To that end, A Deadly Adoption includes all the hallmarks of a television thriller: lots of clunky exposition, lush, soft-focus photography, enough sexual tension to fill a paperback romance novel, and the ever-present threat of physical violence lurking just around the corner. (In pop culture terms, A Deadly Adoption is like a mix of What Lies Beneath, The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, Misery, Fatal Attraction, Natural Born Killers and a Saturday Night Live sketch without the live studio audience.) The twists are big and wild: fake pregnancies, infidelity, kidnapping, false identity and even murder play a part in the fun. In short, A Deadly Adoption was pretty much our ideal Saturday night event.
But what did everyone else think? Ahead, 19 tweets about A Deadly Adoption.