As noted in The Hollywood Reporter, work on Walt Disney Pictures’ release of Captain Nemo: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea has come to a halt due to a change in the screenwriting staff.
Randall Wallace (Braveheart, We Were Soldiers) will be doing rewrites to the movie which was originally announced at the beginning of this year, and has already gone through two other scripts, the first from Bill Marsilli (Deja Vu) and the second from Justin Marks (Fast Forward, Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li), whom /Film.com called “a screenwriter who gets the geek niche.”
Nemo will tell the origin story of French science fiction novelist Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo—a character Disney has visited once before in their 1954 live-action adaptation of Verne’s novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea—and how he created his revolutionary (for Victorian England, that is) undersea ship, the Nautilus. Though some Nemo’s origins are explored in Verne’s sequel novel The Mysterious Island, it’s currently unknown how much Marsilli, Marks, and now Wallace are going to include.
McG (Charlie’s Angels, Terminator: Salvation) has been attached as the director, and in the Variety article I linked to above, it was said that there was a bidding war over making this his very next project. There are also numerous rumors over who would be playing the Indian-born but originally Polish-created Nemo, ranging from Will Smith to Dwayne Johnson, but no one has been cast in the movie yet—probably because they keep changing the script.
Filming is supposed to start this year; let’s hope Wallace can type quickly.
MO says:
Hmm.
A Captain Nemo movie sounds good. But McG? I haven’t seen the new Terminator, but it seems his qualities lie in making rather mindless action movies. Which isn’t what I imagine a Nemo movie to be …