Yabba dabba doo, but make it prestige. Ryan Gosling is producing a new live-action Flintstones movie, and according to the AOL report, the project comes with a twist that could separate it from every other cartoon revival clogging up the release calendar.

Details are still thin, which is Hollywood-speak for "the deal just closed and everyone's still figuring it out." But Gosling's involvement alone is interesting, because he clearly likes big swings. This is a guy who went from Barbie's Ken to The Fall Guy to Project Hail Mary, and a modern-stone-age family comedy is nothing if not another big swing.

The Flintstones has been off the big screen for a long while now, reportedly stuck in development at Warner Bros. for years, with occasional rumors surfacing and then going quiet again. Someone finally pulled it out of the drawer. The 1994 live-action version with John Goodman exists, for the record, and whatever you think of it, it's been more than two decades since anyone tried this in live action.

What's the twist? That part is being kept under wraps, which means I get to speculate for a paragraph and you get to decide whether to believe any of it. Maybe it plays the setting straight, like a Bedrock that takes itself seriously, a Planet of the Apes approach to a town powered by birds and dinosaurs. Maybe it's a period piece from Fred's perspective as a working-class guy in a town that runs on rocks and resentment. Maybe it's just a very expensive excuse to put Gosling in an orange spotted onesie, and I'd watch that too.

What I keep coming back to is that the Flintstones was always a sitcom about suburban life wearing a caveman costume. Fred's a loud guy with a small house, a boss he hates, and a best friend next door. The jokes wrote themselves because the setting did the work. Update that formula correctly and you've got something with actual legs.

No director, cast, or release date yet, so this one's a way off. I'll be watching, mostly because the gap between "live-action Flintstones reboot" and "Ryan Gosling project" is exactly the kind of pairing that shouldn't work and sometimes becomes the best thing in theaters. Project Hail Mary taught me to stop betting against this guy.

But I do want to know who plays Barney. That casting decision will tell us everything about what kind of movie this actually is.