Tarsem Singh Offered ‘The Brothers Grimm: Snow White’
It doesn’t take a magic mirror to figure out thehuge box office successof Tim Burton’sAlice in Wonderlandis to blame for the three differentSnow Whiteprojects currently in development. There’s one by Relativity, one by Universal and one by Disney. The Relativity project, calledThe Brothers Grimm: Snow Whitewas reportedly just offered toTarsem Singh, the director of the visually intense Jennifer Lopez filmThe Cell.That move could put Relativity in line to get their project off the ground before Universal’s competing project calledSnow White and the Huntsman. Meanwhile, Disney is working onSnow White and the Seven, which features the dwarfs as Shaolin monks. Read more about these projects after the break.
Vulturebroke the news of Singh’s possible involvement withThe Brothers Grimm: Snow White, and also outlined the back story behind the battle of theSnow Whiteprojects. Relativity and Universal have been working symbiotically for the past few years. In fact, Relativity finances three out of every four Universal movies and are contracted to do so through 2011. Anyway, independently of that deal, the head of Relativity, Ryan Kavanaugh,bought an expensive spec script forThe Brothers Grimm: Snow Whitea few months ago and said they wanted to produce a 3D version of the film. At the time, Relativity producer Brett Ratner had this to say about the project:
A few months later, Universalalso purchased a very expensive Snow White script, this one calledSnow White and the Huntsman, which, as our own Russ Fischer put it, “reworks the classic fairy tale by having the Huntsman go against orders and refuse to kill Snow White, instead tagging along with her as mentor as she’s ‘trained to fight and survive.‘Snow WhiteplusPrince of Persia, in other words.”
So, now, both projects are in development by two companies who generally work well together and neither looks like it’s going to blink, especially with the news of Singh now attached to the Relativity project. Vulture surmises that the first project to land a big time actress to play the lead – such as Anne Hathaway, Natalie Portman or Scarlett Johansson – will be the one that gets rolling first. (Portman wasreportedly interestedin the Relativity project a few months back, but that was with Jean-Pierre Jeunet as director.)
The Disney project,Snow White and the Seven, isn’t like the other films as it has less of a dark edge and more of a family feel. Dwarfs as monks tend to do that. But still, if that’s the first movie that comes out of the three, the others are going to look reactive instead of proactive.
Surely, we all know the 1927 classic Disney version ofSnow White and the Seven Dwarfsis an idealized and dated work that is ripe for reinterpretation but isn’t one remake more than sufficient? This story of dueling projects would make sense if the projects were at studios who didn’t play nice. But Relativity and Universal do play nice. What do you think?
