While it doesn’t necessarily make sense on paper, there was a time when David Fincher was set up to do an adaptation of “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” for Disney. As you might expect, things didn’t go as planned, and the whole project was scrapped. Now, we know what happened.
READ MORE: The 100 Most Anticipated Films Of 2025
Speaking to Letterboxd, David Fincher talked about his filmmaking career, including some projects that were in development but didn’t actually get made. One of those projects is none other than “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.” According to Fincher, he had some great ideas for the film, but it was his interactions with the studio that doomed the project.
“Look, I really wanted to do ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea’ because what we had in mind was really kind of gross and cool and wet and steampunk and all that,” said Fincher. “You can’t make people be excited about the risks that you’re excited about. Disney was in a place where they were saying, ‘We need to know that there’s a thing that we know how to exploit snout to tail, and you’re going to have to check these boxes for us.’”
READ MORE: The 20 Best Films Of 2024
He continued, “And I was like, ‘You’ve read Jules Verne, right?’ [Laughs] This is a story about an Indian prince who has real issues with white imperialism, and that’s what we want to do. And they were like, ‘Yeah, yeah, fine. As long as there’s a lot less of that in it.’ So you get to a point where you go, ‘Look, I can’t fudge this, and I don’t want you to discover at the premiere what it is that you’ve financed. It doesn’t make any sense because it’s just going to be pulling teeth for the next two years.’ And I don’t want to do that. I mean, life’s too short.”
Again, it’s not all that shocking that things didn’t work out between Disney and Fincher. The filmmaker is a true auteur who likes to have total control over his vision of a film. Disney is not the studio that allows for that sort of creative control. So, unsurprisingly, “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” was not in the cards.
That said, who wouldn’t want to see Fincher’s take on the project? Describing it as gross, cool, wet, and steampunk seems pretty fun and interesting. Definitely something that is a little out of Fincher’s wheelhouse. Sadly, it’s not something we’ll ever get to see.
