Digital wizards are bringing L. Frank Baum’s Oz back to the screen with a major director set to make his animation debut. Daily Variety reports that John Boorman (The Tailor of Panama, Excalibur) is attached to direct a $25 million, CG-animated movie titled The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Boorman also wrote the script with Ron Mita and Jim McClain (Robots). The movie is currently in production and is slated to debut in the summer of 2010.
This trip to Oz is said to be a fairly faithful adaptation of the literary classic but will not be a musical like its classic, live-action predecessor. The pic is being produced by Laurent Rodon and Claude Gorvsky of France’s Films Actions, along with longtime Boorman collaborator Kieran Corrigan.
Oz is being shopped at AFM this week by SND, which is also pushing the $10 million CG kid flick The Magic Roundabout: The Beginning. The producers of Oz are hoping their film doesn’t suffer the same fate as the $35 million French animated feature A Monster in Paris, which ran out of money and has been temporarily shut down. The EuropaCorp production is being directed by Bibo Bergeron, whose credits include the DreamWorks Animation features Shark Tale and The Road to El Dorado.
