Getty Images / James Daveney / Chicago Tribune
Flamin' Hot Cheetos can do no wrong. The snack turned a dying brand of party chips into an ever-lasting cultural sensation in the 90s, and now, Flamin' Hot Cheetos are pretty much everywhere, from a recent (surprisingly cool) Forever 21 swimwear collection, to, apparently, Thanksgiving turkey seasoning, which Gwen Stefani and Blake Shelton tried to put on the map last year. Now, fittingly, the best snack of all time is getting the biopic treatment. As Deadline reports, Flamin' Hot will be directed by Eva Longoria and it will follow Richard Montañez, the Mexican immigrant who created Flamin' Hot Cheetos.Montañez' story is ripe for a film adaption. He came up with the idea for the snack while he was a janitor at Frito-Lay in the 80s, experimenting with a throwaway batch of un-cheesed Cheetos. He put chili powder on them to make them taste more like grilled Mexican street corn, he told Inc in 2016. Montañez essentially reinvigorated one of the biggest American food corporations with the inventiveness of Mexican street food culture, and from there launched a career as a PepsiCo exec, where he now leads multicultural sales and marketing in North America. He's also a professional speaker and author who focuses on the importance of inclusion in his industry.The Fox Searchlight and Franklin Entertainment film will also help increase representation of Latinx culture in the film industry, a welcome shift after a recent, damning study by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative. The study looked at 1,200 popular films from 2007-2018 and found only 3% of them had Latinx leads or co-leads while only 4% of them had Latinx directors. Flamin' Hot Cheetos are the gift that keeps on giving. It's about time they got their own movie.Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.Follow Taylor Hosking on Twitter and Instagram.
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