According to the original release plan, next month should have seen the release of the next Eddie Murphy comedy, A Thousand Words. We've had, to be fair, quite a lot to say about Murphy's criminally unambitious career choices over the past months at Den Of Geek, and A Thousand Words looked like the same kind of easy high concept choice that's led him towards the likes of Meet Dave and Imagine That (the latter of which isn't too bad) in recent times.

For A Thousand Words is a film about a man who has just 1000 words left to say in his life. Help yourself to the easy gags about how many of those words should be apologies for some of his more recent films if you want (and in earlier years, at least 40% of those words from Murphy's mouth would have been enough to secure an R rating), but the fact remains that here's an Eddie Murphy vehicle that's now struggling to get a cinematic release. The same Eddie Murphy whose name is plastered over an abundance of box office hits, and the same Eddie Murphy who's now as far from movie stardom as The Village People are.

Furthermore, it's not as if he's avoiding commercial fare (Murphy, not The Village People). The likes of Kevin Costner have actively searched out smaller, more interesting films, and thus, it's less of a surprise when they don't always get a wide or lengthy release. Murphy though is steadfastly making the same kind of films that have for a long time given him box office rewards, and he's getting payback for it now. In short, the formula is broken, and he seems a long, long way away from the man who had us holding our guts in the 80s when he made us laugh so much. Guttingly, we've now come to expect Murphy films to be shit, and finally it seems his audience has woken up to the fact.

A Thousand Words may be a decent film, to be fair. But, in common with the vast majority of residents of the planet, we've not seen it, and we're not likely to see it soon. The film was, from what we can tell, all done and dusted by last autumn, and its cast includes the wonderful Allison Janney. Less promisingly, it's directed by Brian Robbins, the man responsible for the shit-fest that was Norbit (a very successful shit-fest, to be fair, but it's not making anyone's Top 10 list in a hurry).

But all concerned appear to have finished work on the project (and some report test screenings going back many months), and yet all signs of a release date have disappeared. In fact, IMDb suggests that the earliest we may see the film is in 2011 (one or two very tentatively suggest December 2010, but that'd still be over a year after the film was finished, and over a year after its original planned date).

We'll go one stage further. Given just how much money Murphy's last two films have lost, we'd be shocked if it sees the inside of a cinema at all. After all, who wants to pony up the money to promote the film when Murphy's last two movies haven't even pulled in a total of $30m between them at the US box office? That doesn't even cover the man's salary usually, let alone a marketing budget. As such, there's been no sign of a trailer. No sign of a poster. No mention of the film whatsoever. There's not even a Wikipedia page for it, and there seems to be a Wikipedia page for everything else in the world.

Bluntly, it seems as though the movie has disappeared, and that Murphy is about to have his first straight to DVD release. Given that, when it was greenlit, this would have been earmarked as a potentially solid comedy hit, that's some comedown. It shouldn't have been like this, either, but Murphy has become a poster child for what goes wrong when, instead of taking some risks with your career, you go back to the same well, the same kind of high concept dross, time and time again. And genuinely, we're gutted. Voicing a Shrek sequel has become the recent highlight of a very funny man's career, and he's better than that. He just seems unwilling to take a gamble (particularly surprising off the back of his Oscar-nominated part in Dreamgirls, arguably the one risky role he's taken in recent memory).

We'll keep you posted if we find out anything more about it. But right now, A Thousands Words is the mysterious, disappearing movie. Here's hoping it doesn't take Murphy's career with it. The man needs a Tarantino-injected career resurrection more than any actor of his generation.