Mendes takes on Great And Powerful Oz
Robert Downey Jr could play the wizard...
Now that Sam Mendes has got some free time, with Bond 23 officially dropped into the deep freeze, the Brit director is looking for another project to tinker with.
According to Production Weekly , he’s in talks to direct Oz The Great And Powerful .
The film would draw inspiration from a number of L. Frank Baum’s Oz tomes, as well as a few original ideas. Not only that, but the reliably off-centre Robert Downey Jr. is in negotiations to play the well-known wizard.
In Oz The Great And Powerful , the wizard is a charlatan in a travelling circus who goes on a similar journey to Dorothy’s, and soon comes across a strange land known as Oz.
Mendes would direct the flick for Disney, and would be facing competition from three other Oz productions.
There are two at Warner Bros – one simply entitled Oz , the other a pseudo-sequel about Dorothy’s granddaughter who has an adventure all her own – and another at Universal, who are adapting musical Wicked .
So will Mendes take on Oz , or will he default back to comic book adap Preacher ? We imagine some of his decision rests on if Disney can land Downey Jr., who’s busy himself with Holmes 2 and Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity .
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Josh Winning has worn a lot of hats over the years. Contributing Editor at Total Film, writer for SFX, and senior film writer at the Radio Times. Josh has also penned a novel about mysteries and monsters, is the co-host of a movie podcast, and has a library of pretty phenomenal stories from visiting some of the biggest TV and film sets in the world. He would also like you to know that he "lives for cat videos..." Don't we all, Josh. Don't we all.
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