Producer Graham King has revealed to SciFiWire that Tim Burton’s planned film adaptation of 1960’s gothic television soap opera “Dark Shadows” with Johnny Depp attached is set to begin filming in the fall of next year.
“We’re actually going to shoot that film next September/October with Tim Burton and Johnny,” King revealed. “We’ve been working on the script a lot, even though he’s working on [“Alice In Wonderland”]. We’ve been given a script. John August wrote the first screenplay. We’re making some changes, but the film’s going to be in production, as I say, September or October of next year.”
On contributing to current fad of vampires in film, King reportedly notes that Burton’s film “would have something to say in the post-“Twilight” emo vampire world” concluding that “this is going to be Tim Burton and Johnny doing a vampire movie, right?” He has a point though, as tiresome as we are growing of the Depp-Burton working relationship, Depp as a vampire with Burton behind the camera might actually have something interesting to say in the world of glittery, non-threatening bloodsuckers today.
So what does this mean for Depp’s handful of other projects? Rob Marshall’s “Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” and Depp’s potential team up with Angelina Jolie in “The Tourist” will probably shoot before “Dark Shadows” in 2010. If Depp really is in contention, we suspect Martin Scorsese’s Frank Sinatra biopic won’t begin until at least 2011 (though no lead has been cast), after ‘Shadows’ as would be the case on his newly-linked “Seven Friends Of Pancho Villa and the Woman With Six Fingers” with Emir Kusturica; and that still leaves the likes of “The Incredible Mr. Limpet,” “The Lone Ranger,” a we-desperately-wish Carol Channing biopic that will likely never happen and probably a few others that escapes us on Depp’s plate. Suffice to say, his going to be a busy for the next year or two, but looking at that list, you can be sure that at least one or two of those will fall by the wayside (and Depp is certainly not confirmed for “Sinatra” either). And hey, just cause a producer says a film is going to shoot at in a certain period, with a high-in-demand star like Johnny Depp, anything can happen.
