It’s going to take a while for Gore Verbinski to get his John Logan-scripted adaptation of the underwater video game BioShock up and running at Universal, so in the meantime he’ll do what we all do when it’s time to hurry up and wait: get a cup of coffee, chat up a couple interns, make an animated movie.
Rango, also scripted by Logan, will re-team Verbinski and Johnny Depp. The latter will voice the titular main character, a “a household pet that goes on an adventure to discover its true self,” which sounds a bit like Bolt and a lot like every other goddamn movie Disney made between 1974 and 1984. (Tron, that was about a runaway animal. The Black Hole, too. Those were great.)
Paramount is paying for this opus, which Verbinski will produce through his own company, perhaps in conjunction with Nickelodeon films. Verbinkski, meanwhile, promises a lot of stuff about cutting edge animation, capturing all of Depp’s acting, and so forth, which leads one to wonder where the demarcation line between this and full-on performance capture might lie.