Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. Henry Selick's adaptation of Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach is 20 years old this year. Can you believe it? How the fuck did that happen? Why am I old now? Time sucks!
Disney's coming off of a mostly successful run of digging into their back catelogue and mining it for reboots. Their live action movies are either really great or make a lot of money (sometimes both). We have Bill Condon's Beauty and the Beast hitting next year and I predict right now that it's going to make all of the money. Little Mermaid is in the works with Lin-Manuel Miranda and now it looks like the Mouse House is trying for a new live action version of James and the Giant Peach with recent Bond director Sam Mendes helming, per Deadline. Nick Hornby will script.
Your memory of the original may paint it as entirely stop-motion, but it wasn't. Selick filmed live action for a chunk of it, going stop-motion when James actually went into the peach. If Mendes is going live-action for all of it, I wonder how much is going to be digitally animated anyway... I guess that doesn't really matter since The Jungle Book was mostly digital and that still counted as a live-action remake.
I'm a big fan of Selick's Nightmare Before Christmas follow-up and am curious what this one is going to look like. Mendes is a great director, but this would be a radically different tone for him. I'm sure he could pull it off, but I'd be curious to see how his dark sensabilities mesh with Roald Dahl's. Maybe that combination will be too bleak, but I know I'm down to see it either way.
Here's the original trailer to kick up some nostalgia-dust for you:
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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