Earlier today, ComingSoon.net broke the news of a new Beauty and the Beast project that would bring together Guillermo del Toro and “Harry Potter” star Emma Watson–you can read that here–but during the same interview with producer Denise Di Novi for the upcoming rom-com Crazy, Stupid, Love., we got a couple of updates on two very different adapted projects she already had on her dance card.
One of them was an adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s short stories collected as The Illustrated Man, which Zack Snyder had signed on to direct nearly four years ago and which Novi still has hopes will happen.
“I was the only person who was sad when he decided to do Superman,” she laughed. “(Zack) reminds me of Tim (Burton*) in a lot in that he’s such an auteur, and he just gives 1000% to whatever project he’s working on, but that’s one of my favorites. I’m a huge Bradbury fan, and (we’re just) waiting for him.” (*Novi produced many of Burton’s early hits including Edward Scissorhands, Batman Returns and The Nightmare Before Chrsitmas.)
The other project we were wondering about was the long-in-development live action movie based on the Hanna-Barbera cartoon The Jetsons, which Di Novi gave us an update on:
“I’ve been developing that for so many years,” she told us. “We actually just turned a new draft in of that script last week to the studio, so I’m still trying to make it. I still think it would be a hit movie. (Robert Rodriguez) was attached to it and his version was fantastic, but honestly, it wasn’t a mainstream studio version. It was kind of his version of what he would shoot at his studio in Texas. He’s got a great set-up down there, and I think part of it is that ‘it may be fun to play with all those big toys at the studio’ but he has a pretty good system going.”
“Part of it is that every couple of years, the genre kind of changes,” she continued. “I really credit Jeff Robinov at Warner Bros. with this. In choosing Chris Nolan to do Batman, he really exploded the expectations on adapting all these kinds of titles, the pressure is on to really make them the coolest movies, not the cornball cartoon movies. Every couple years it’s changed what they thought the movie should be and I’m hoping now we’re hitting it at the right time. I’ve never given up on that movie.”
