As we posted here a while back, the Farrelly Brothers have a Three Stooges movie in the works. This is not a biopic of Moe and Curly Howard and Larry Fine, as we’ve previously seen with the 2000 TV movie starring Paul Ben-Victor, Michael Chiklis and Evan Handler, but rather a new comedy “built around the antics of the three characters that Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Howard played in the Columbia Pictures shorts.” Who will play the Stooges this time around? The answers may shock and astonish you!

According to Variety, MGM “has set Sean Penn to play Larry, and negotiations are underway with Jim Carrey to play Curly, with the actor already making plans to gain 40 pounds to approximate the physical dimensions of Jerome ‘Curly’ Howard. The studio is zeroing in on Benicio Del Toro to play Moe.”

My first thought after reading this and cleaning up the Coke Zero I spit out all over my computer monitor was that this has to be a mistake. The mistake being that someone at the Variety.com office hit a switch about a week too soon, and that this article was meant to go up on April 1st. It’s too close to such brilliant pranks as Scorsese to Direct Final Harry Potter Film to be real, right? I’m sure we can expect a retraction any minute now.

Either that, or…this is real? Sean Penn did almost display a detectable sense of humor in his Oscar acceptance speech, even if ever so briefly. So maybe…nah. Gotta be a mistake.