Every
now and again Production Weekly lets slip a whopper of a scoop on their
Twitter feed, and that just happened right now. Here’s the
tweet in question:
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
What the hell?
I immediately ran to the interwebs
and found out that Oz the Great and Powerful is the new name of Brick,
the Oz movie
Kapner wrote for Joe Roth at Disney. And, in tried and true 21st
century fashion, it’s a fucking prequel. This time it’s the story of how
Professor Marvel went from being a con man in Kansas to being the
Wizard of Oz himself.
This is just one of a couple of new Wizard of
Oz movies
that are moving around behind the scenes, but this indicates that Oz The
Great and Powerful (much better title) could be the
first out the starting gate. And the timing is perfect; with Bond 23 getting
delayed forever, Mendes needs work, and Robert Downey Jr… well, he
doesn’t really need work, does he? In fact, his schedule seems really
packed in the near future, what with Gravity and Sherlock Holmes 2 probably
both going in the near future. Still, if there’s a bright side to the
guy who directed American Beauty making a Wizard of Oz prequel from a script by the guy
who wrote The Whole
Nine Yards it’s that Downey could be the star.