Disney taking another shot at 'Something Wicked This Way Comes'

[Sawyer]

http://www.deadline.com/2014/03/dis...ay-bradburys-something-wicked-this-way-comes/

Disney, Seth Grahame-Smith Making New Film Of Ray Bradbury’s ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’
By MIKE FLEMING JR

EXCLUSIVE: Disney is making a new version of the classic Ray Bradbury thriller novel Something Wicked This Way Comes. The studio, which turned Bradbury’s novel into a 1983 movie, has set Seth Grahame-Smith to make his feature directorial debut on the project. He will begin work immediately writing a treatment and the studio will then hire a writer to script the project. Grahame-Smith and David Katzenberg’s KatzSmith Productions will be the producing banner and Katzenberg will produce the film.

The novel tells the story of how Mr. Dark, the evil proprietor of a traveling carnival preys on the residents of a small town by bartering possession of their souls for the dreams each one has. Grahame-Smith said that it was his favorite book as a child, but he doesn’t feel the movie is sacrosanct. Though the late Bradbury wrote the script, he later lamented that the movie lost a lot of the book. Grahame-Smith intends to put it back and plug a new generation into the tale.

“I have been so crazy about this book and it was such a formative title in my life that I actually wrote a piece on NPR about why it is so important for young males to read,” Grahame-Smith said. “It is a classic coming of age, father-son story about the transition from childhood to adulthood and how kids can’t wait to be adults and adults romanticize their childhoods. I’m not remaking the movie; I want the haunted atmosphere that makes the book so chilling, and I want to reinstate some of the classic scenes from the book that were missing from the ’83 film.”

While the scribe Disney will hire works on the script based on Grahame-Smith’s treatment, he will finish the Beetlejuice sequel he’s working on with Tim Burton with Michael Keaton hopefully reprising. Burton is next helming Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children for Fox, but will follow with Beetlejuice, which Grahame-Smith scripted and he and Katzenberg are producing for Fox. Grahame-Smith is separately completing a sequel novel to Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, which Grand Central will publish in January. He’s repped by WME.

I always have wanted to read the book/see the original movie, because I enjoy the Bradbury works that I've read, but I've just never gotten around to it.

 

[Gort Baringa]

I thought the book of Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles was also much better than the film.

 

[Sawyer]

Over-used in fancasts, but... Cumberbatch?

 

[Still Wynning]

Over-used in fancasts, but... Cumberbatch?

I was thinking him or Tom Hiddleston.

Maybe the latter, since he's already with Disney.

 

[Sawyer]

David Leslie Johnson Hired As Writer

 

[Sawyer]

http://insidemovies.ew.com/2015/01/16/beetlejuice-2-something-wicked-gremlins-seth-grahame-smith/2/

SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES

Ray Bradbury’s novel was about two boys who tangle with a malevolent carnival that has come to their town to collect souls, and Grahame-Smith is counting on making it his directorial debut. It was previously made into a movie in 1983, starring Jason Robards as the aging father of one of the boys and Jonathan Pryce as the sinister carnival ringleader. (See the poster above.)

Grahame-Smith hopes to retain more of the original novel in his film, although he’ll be updating its 1930s setting to a different era of nostalgia: the 1980s.

“I can’t help but think of this in sort of Amblin terms,” he says, referring to the Steven Spielberg-produced films of the ’80s like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and The Goonies. “Boys riding bikes, out on their own, exploring and having to face an unspeakable evil by themselves. You want the boyhood aspects of it to be authentic, and the most authentic time that I know how to represent is my own boyhood.”

Status: “A great writer named David Leslie Johnson is going to write the script, based on a treatment I am just about to finish now,” Grahame-Smith says. “I hope to get a draft from him in the early spring and then start trying to make it real. The fast track, I would love to shoot in the fall of this year—if the draft came in really strong, if the studio liked it. It needs to take place in the autumn. I always say it’s a movie that you need to be able to smell the chimney smoke in the air.”

Paying homage to 80s Spielberg sounds good to me.