The Smurfs may soon be heading to a theater near you, and bigger and better than ever before...at least visually.

ComingSoon.net reports that Columbia Pictures will be making a 3-D Smurf movie for a December 17, 2010 release. For the few uninitiated, the Smurfs are small, blue-skinned men and women with highly-appropriate names like "Brainy Smurf" and "Grouchy Smurf", who were constantly evading capture by an evil sorcerer named Gargamel in their hit TV show.

Created in 1958 by Belgian cartoonist Pierre Culliford, a.k.a. Peyo, Smurfs became a pop culture phenomenon stateside, broadcast on Saturday morning television from 1981-90, and cross-marketed in games, toys, theme parks and countless other licensed items.

Along with being in 3-D, The Smurfs movie will be a hybrid of live-action and CGI.

The script is to be written by David Stern and David Weiss, and directed by Colin Brady, the visual effects artist for Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events.