With Sam Mendes confirming earlier this year that after two films, “Skyfall” and “Spectre,” he was moving on from the James Bond franchise, he’s wasted little time in filling up his schedule. He’s already signed on to direct the Steven Spielberg-produced drama “The Voyeur’s Motel,” and in a move that suggests Mendes hasn’t tired of making big blockbusters, he’s now got a project that will find him working inside the Disney machine.
Deadline reports that Mendes is in talks to develop and direct a live-action adaptation of Roald Dahl‘s “James And The Giant Peach.” It would seem that Disney wasn’t put off by the weak box office ($153 million worldwide) of this summer’s Spielberg-directed Dahl picture, “The BFG,” and are banking on a top tier director and screenwriter getting the job done, a formula that for the most part has worked quite well. Indeed, Nick Hornby (“Brooklyn,” “An Education“) will be penning the screenplay about an orphan who makes a fantastical escape from his horrible aunts. Here’s the book synopsis:
Roald Dahl was a champion of the underdog and all things little—in this case, an orphaned boy oppressed by two nasty, self-centered aunts. How James escapes his miserable life with the horrible aunts and becomes a hero is a Dahlicious fantasy of the highest order. You will never forget resourceful little James and his new family of magically overgrown insects—a ladybug, a spider, a grasshopper, a glowworm, a silkworm, and the chronic complainer, a centipede with a hundred gorgeous shoes. Their adventures aboard a luscious peach as large as a house take them across the Atlantic Ocean, through waters infested with peach-eating sharks and skies inhabited by malevolent Cloudmen, to a ticker-tape parade in New York City.
Of course, “James And The Giant Peach” was previously adapted by Henry Selick in his 1996 stop-motion animated movie, which has more than a few fans who may be dismayed to hear about this remake. But by this point, it should be quite clear that no Disney property is safe from being retooled.