Tim Burton To Direct Sleeping Beauty Remake Maleficent?
It bodes well forAlice in Wonderlandthat Disney are now reportedly lining up another revisionist re-take on one of their cartoon classics forTim Burtonto direct.Maleficentwill be a retelling of theSleeping Beautystory that focuses on the Mistress of all Evil instead of that pretty somnambulist and her slightly creepy Prince Phillip.
The studio registered the domain namemaleficentmovie.comsome time last summer, so I’ve been waiting for news a while. Of course, until now I wasn’t entirely convinced it was going to be a live action picture – well, in so much as it will be live action, which I’m expecting will be probably to just the extent thatAliceis – and not an animated spin-off, a la theTinkerbellseries or that Timon and Pumbaa picture.
One question is where this leaves Burton’sDark Shadows, a film we had previously been told would shoot this year.
Producer Graham King toldCHUDlast week that there was not yet a finishedDark Shadowsscript. Seeing as there’s no scheduled release date for the picture, and that Johnny Depp could easily find another one of his nascent projects to slip into place, I’d think we’ll be on hold a while beforeShadowsgoes before cameras.
Burton also has hisFrankenweeniestop motion picture gearing up to go, but even if he doesn’t co-direct that one, as he didThe Corpse Bride, the nature of animation should allow him energy and time to overlap some serious preproduction on another film.
The character of Maleficent is a Disney creation, the original storyline having an un-named evil fairy godmother. Since appearing in theirSleeping Beautytoon – in which she had some quite brilliantly grotesque sidekick-minions that I’d love to see in theMaleficentmovie – she’s cropped up in theHouse of MouseTV series and theKingdom Heartsvideogames, both times as the supreme evil mastermind behind the heroes' and heroines' suffering. Essentially, she’s the BIG Big Bad at Disney. As such, I’m not sure they’ll let the adult Maleficent be a sympathetic character and if she’s really going to be the film’s protagonist, I suspect we’ll have to go back in time a little, a laWicked, and find out just why she’s grinding her axes.
I definitely hope we get to see Maleficent in her magnificent Dragon form. Smaug’s new master Guillermo del Toro hasdescribed this as one of his favourite dragons, and it isn’t hard to see why.
Rumour viaAint it Cool, Domain name viaJim Hill
