Every
now and again Production Weekly lets slip a whopper of a scoop on their
Twitter feed, and that just happened right now. Here’s the
tweet in question:
Sam
Mendes is the front runner to direct “Oz The Great And Powerful” by
Mitchell Kapner, with Robert Downey, Jr. circling to play the Wizard
What the hell?
I immediately ran to the interwebs
and found out that Oz the Great and Powerful is the new name of Brick,
the Oz movie
Kapner wrote for Joe Roth at Disney. And, in tried and true 21st
century fashion, it’s a fucking prequel. This time it’s the story of how
Professor Marvel went from being a con man in Kansas to being the
Wizard of Oz himself.
This is just one of a couple of new Wizard of
Oz movies
that are moving around behind the scenes, but this indicates that Oz The
Great and Powerful (much better title) could be the
first out the starting gate. And the timing is perfect; with Bond 23 getting
delayed forever, Mendes needs work, and Robert Downey Jr… well, he
doesn’t really need work, does he? In fact, his schedule seems really
packed in the near future, what with Gravity and Sherlock Holmes 2 probably
both going in the near future. Still, if there’s a bright side to the
guy who directed American Beauty making a Wizard of Oz prequel from a script by the guy
who wrote The Whole
Nine Yards it’s that Downey could be the star.
5 comments
This is entirely necessary. Yes? Yes? No. Well. RDJ seemed at one point to be a force for good. And yet he may be. But with choices like this and THE SOLOIST and SHERLOCK 2 and his vain hope that IRON MAN will pan out beyond one or two movies…I just want him to do something new.
Dear lord, how often has Wizard of Oz been mined recently?… with Wicked (musical and book), Tin Man, the "dark" American McGee/Tim Burton-style version being planned at Warner Bros, etc.
The only recent Oz project I had any remote interest in was that animated one that John Boorman was supposed to be working on at some point. I remember seeing production art, too. Anyone else remember that? Whatever happened to it? If you'll excuse the pun, this sounds like another one of those "bricks" in the road to Idiocracy. Every other movie idea now sounds more like the spoof of a movie idea in some satirical comedy. The future will be a living, breathing satire that no one appreciates.
This movie is going to be gorgeous, Mendes has never made a bad looking movie. I'm excited. I hope it washes that Alice Burton taste out of our mouths.
What the hell happened to John Boorman's WIZARD OF OZ computer-animated film? All I can find out online is that it was pushed back a year. The preproduction art was beautiful, and Boorman has been fascinated by the Oz story for years (i.e., ZARDOZ, one of the great batshit-insane movies of the '70's). I'd really, really prefer seeing a Boorman film rather than this not-very-enthralling-sounding project.
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