With ALICE IN WONDERLAND mystifyingly making a billion bucks at the box office, we can probably expect to see fairy tale updates rival vampire projects in the Hollywood lemming line.
The latest is a new version of SNOW WHITE, which Deadline claims will be “an edgy re-imagining of the German folk tale”. Just how edgy? Brett Ratner himself is producing it.
“This is not your grandfather’s Snow White,” Ratner said. “Melisa [Wallack, screenwriter] went back to the 500 year old folk tale and put in some of the things that were missing from Walt Disney’s film. His dwarves were miners, and here they are robbers. There is also a dragon that was in the original folk tale. Walt made one of the great movies of all time, but ours is edgy and there is more comedy. The original, made for its time, was soft compared to what we’re going to do.“
What makes these projects even more attractive to studios is that the material is in the public domain, thereby saving them the cost and contractual hassle of acquiring rights to the intellectual property.
There are already a number of public domain properties in development, including reboots, remakes, prequels and sequels for JACK THE GIANT KILLER, FRANKENSTEIN, HANSEL AND GRETEL, LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD, THE WIZARD OF OZ, DRACULA, 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA, THE INVISIBLE MAN, TREASURE ISLAND, and the SLEEPING BEAUTY villainess spinoff MALEFICENT.
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