Hollywood is determined to strip mine every last bit of glitter out of the world’s fairy tales. Every whimsical tale is getting a dark and edgy makeover.
Yet Fables remains locked in NBC’s vault. Go figure. (Pre-established property, check. Fanbase, check. Comic book, check. Fairy tale deconstruction, check. But the big bucks don’t flow into my pocket.)
Peter Pan joins Snow White, The Wizard of Oz, and I forget what else in having several “reinterpretations” battling for dominance. Back in March, The Hollywood Reporter listed five Peter Pan projects kicking around Hollywood in various stages of completion. Has no one heeded the lesson of Hook?
Apparently not. But of those five one has emerged as a frontrunner: Pan. ScreenDaily reports that Aaron Eckhart, Sean Bean and AnnaSophia Robb are all attached to star. Pan (apparently) takes place entirely in the real world, and in the gritty, crime ridden 21st century. Eckhart plays a tormented detective named Hook who is on the trail of a evil childlike kidnapper named Pan. Bean will play Smee, the chief detective, and Eckhart’s only ally on the police force. Robb is Wendy, a survivor of Pan’s kidnapping, who leaves an asylum to assist in hunting him down.
Pan has been around for a long time. It was once at New Line with Guillermo Del Toro attached to direct. Now it’s at Essential Entertainment with Ben Hibon directing, and is pre-selling itself at Cannes.
There must be something in it for Del Toro to have once been interested, but that hook (pun not intended) is just so goddamn corny. You know how this would be cool? Abandon the stupid names and fairy tale angle, and just make it a good, old-fashioned police procedural. Come on! You have two rugged, tough, should-be-leading-men leads who are aging away for want of good adult thrillers. Have them play weary partners on the hunt of a creepy, high-voiced kidnapper who likes to leave copies of J.M.Barrie at the scene of his crimes. Audiences long for the dark, rain-drenched thrillers like we had in the 1970s and 1980s. They’re sick of seeing boys playing hardened cops. Give them Eckhart and Bean in a Silence of the Lambs type of thing, and watch the box office numbers climb.
This is the perfect chance to change a trend for the better. Or you could keep milking this idea that you’re convinced audiences have already bought into because of one Alice in Wonderland.
10 comments
You know, this actually doesn’t sound that terrible. It’s the first one of these shits that I actually feel like watching. I can see why Del Toro passed… He was afraid people would think it was a prequel or sequel to Pan’s Labyrinth.
Sounds a little like Brom’s The Child Thief, a novel that came out a year or two ago.
On second reading, no, it really doesn’t sound much like The Child Thief. That’s what I get for replying quickly with a head full of cold medicine. *sigh*
I want to kill everybody. Awful.
GDT was taking the development bucks – getting a foothold in Hollywood and forming relationships with different studios. He was never going to make a cock-awful piece of shit like this.
This actually sounds not half-bad. Certainly a unique take on the story. Most of these fairy tale “revisions” seem half-assed at best, but considering the talent involved, I’d give this a shot.
This sounds fucking abysmal.
If it’s deconstructed as well as Freeway, I’m in.
Freeway was my exact point of reference upon hearing this. I’ll side with the interested team on this one.
This sounds like Donald Kaufman’s follow-up to “The 3”.
While a straight up Pan movie (BANGERANG is a great title, BTW) would be cool (IMHO it should be about Rufio, by far the most fascinating character from HOOK. Seriously, how long are the Rufio fans of the world going to wait till that character gets his own stand alone movie or at least graphic novel or something??), I have to agree that this cutesy fairy tale conceit doesn’t much interest me. SUSPECT ZERO may not have been “all that” or “a bag of potato ships”, but it did at least whet my appetite for a more down to earth Eckhart police film, and pairing him with Sean Bean seems like a good move. Let’s hope the “Smee” naming convention stuff gets dropped, and instead we get a more grounded thriller
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