Sam Mendes To Direct ‘Oz The Great And Powerful’ With Star Robert Downey, Jr?
Update:TheLA Timesmentions that another director who is a top candidate for the film isAdam Shankman(Bedtime Stories). So letthattemper your excitement a bit, at least for now.
Guess this answers the question about whatSam Mendesis doing while EON Productions figures out the future of James Bond. While the director was hired as a ‘consultant’ onBond 23(supposedly a precursor to being the director of that film, but without MGM having to put out any money for him yet) the shelving of that movie leaves him free.
Now we hear he may direct aWizard of Ozmovie,Oz the Great and Powerful, with leading manRobert Downey, Jr. Talk about change-ups. What’s going on here?
Sadly, we don’t know much. The basic info comes from aProduction Weeklytweet (those guys have been on a roll lately with casting and project announcements) which says, simply:
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.
So this deal isn’t done — both those names are tentative at this point. But the very possibility of the film is unexpected and intriguing.
This one is being produced byAlice in Wonderland’sJoe Roth. The original title of the script wasBrick, as reported by theLA Timeslast month. (Oz the Great and Powerfulis a better title for several reasons, not least that there’s already a great film calledBrick.)
Kapner’s script takes the idea that the Wizard is also transported to Oz from Kansas, and details how he came to be the power seen inThe Wizard of Oz. Kapner based the script of a collection of influences from L. Frank Baum’s Oz books as well as some ideas of his own to produce a story that suggests “the wizard is a charlatan who’s part of a traveling circus but goes on a similar odyssey as Dorothy when he mysteriously lands in Oz.”
