By What is it about Pinocchio these days? How did Carlo Collodi’s kooky fairy tale get so popular with Hollywood? There’s a stop-motion Pinocchio from the Jim Henson Company produced by Guillermo del Toro in the works, Shawn Levy (Night at the Museum, Real Steel) is supposed to be at the helm of the Pinocchio prequel The Three Misfortunes of Geppetto, and now Tim Burton is seriously contemplating his own take on the little wooden boy.
Burton is in talks with Warner Bros. about the project, and he’d like Robert Downey, Jr. to play Geppetto. Why Geppetto rather than the marionette? Turns out the Warner Bros. Pinocchio movie is Geppetto-centric: it follows the woodcarver on a quest to find his missing wooden son. (Yeah… that was totally the magical, interesting part of the story.) Another possibility for Burton’s next film after Dark Shadows and Franeknweenie is an adaptation of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, Ransom Riggs’s spooky YA novel about a haunted orphanage on a mysterious island.
I’d rather Burton do Home for Peculiar Children than Pinocchio. It’s a new story rather than a possible retread, and it’s thematically and stylistically up Burton’s alley without being too comfortable. I guess I’m mainly afraid he’ll turn his Geppetto tale into something soulless like Alice in Wonderland or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Those movies, colorful and obnoxious as they were, had all the life of a rotting log.
[Via Heat Vision/THR]