After finishing last year’s Anna Karenina, director Joe Wright was rumored to be attached to several projects. He was linked to everything from the Fifty Shades of Grey film to an adaptation of the stage play A Season in the Congo with Chiwetel Ejiofor. Now we’re hearing that he’s in talks to direct Pan, a re-imagining of Peter Pan for Warner Brothers.
The script is being written by child actor turned screenwriter Jason Fuchs (Ice Age: Continental Drift) and the details are scant right now, but with a director like Wright at the helm, this could be something radically new and different. Wright is known for his imaginative takes on literary works like Atonement and for playing fast and loose with the rules of the prototypical fairy tale narrative like he did in Hanna.
Pan is the third adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s children’s classic that is currently in the pipeline, with Disney rumored to be working on an adaptation of the musical Peter and the Starcatchers, and a far more radical version of the story in development that supposedly features Aaron Eckhart as a heroic Captain Hook and Sean Bean as Smee, playing cops that are hunting down a childlike kidnapper. No word on how far along those other projects are but you can bet that they’re being rushed into production now that there are multiple Pan films in the works.
It looks like Barrie’s classic character is about to return, and in a big way. We saw a similar thing happen with Snow White a couple of years ago (Mirror Mirror, Snow White and the Huntsman) and now it seems to be Peter Pan’s turn for the Hollywood treatment. Hopefully he fares better than the Disney princess did as both of her outings failed to strike a chord with audiences.
Tell us, do you think Pan sounds like a promising project? Are you excited to see Joe Wright at the helm? Let us know in the comments section below.