15 Oz books being made into film?

[Rashid]

"Warner Bros. Follows the Yellow Brick Road

Posted by Sam on Wednesday, 22 Aug 2007

A new take on the various L. Frank Baum books from which “The Wizard of Oz” tale was born will be explored by Warner Bros., according to Variety. Baum created a total of 15 stories that surround the Oz legacy.

Village Roadshow Pictures will team up with Warner Bros. by taking an idea hatched by Spawn creator Todd McFarlane and screenwriter Josh Olson. The former will produce while the latter will create a script.

This has been a project in the works for quite some time but now it can go full steam ahead since Warner purchased the rights to “Oz” from Ted Turner.

“McFarlane has a vision of Oz that is a dark, edgy and muscular PG-13, without a singing Munchkin in sight,” wrote journalist Michael Fleming. “That was clear with a toy line he launched several years ago that featured a buxom Dorothy and Toto re-imagined as an over-sized snarling warthog.

Olson’s vision is of a bit tamer PG movie and hopefully the two can find some middle ground of compromise that will please them both and not hurt the final product.

“I saw those toys, and Dorothy as some bondage queen isn’t something I want to do,” Olson told Fleming. “The appealing thing about the Baum books to me is how wildly imaginative they are. There are crazy characters from amazing places. I want this to be ‘Harry Potter’ dark, not ‘Seven’ dark.”

“My pitch was ‘How do we get people who went to ‘Lord of the Rings’ to embrace this?’ ” McFarlane said. “I want to create [an interpretation] that has a 2007 wow factor. You’ve still got Dorothy trapped in an odd place, but she’s much closer to the Ripley from ‘Alien’ than a helpless singing girl.”

This being said, Olson does suggest that they won’t be throwing the baby out with the bath water and whatever is finally decided on will take the classic Judy Garland movie into account on some level that might make this new one feel a bit like a sequel."

Source

This slightly interests me, but it's definitely not something I'm looking forward to. The Wizard of Oz was my favorite childhood movie and still one of my favorites to this day. I've read the first 2 books in the series so I wouldn't mind seeing Jack Pumpkinhead and Tip adapted into film though.

Also, how make 15 books in a film series? They're not actually making 15 movies are they? They're short books, so I could see them being made into 7 or 8 films at the least, but even that's a lot.

Well, at least they never obtained the rights to all 40 Oz books.

Edited August 23, 2007 by Rashid

[MalaCloudy Black]

It sounds like an ambitious undertaking that would fizzle before two films.

[Guest starsaligned916]

Are you sure they're not making one film for the fifteen stories?

[Gabriel]

Honestly... it sounds like a good idea, but if McFarlane isn't allowed to go as dark as he wants to, it won't be worth doing. It'll be like Spawn all over again... and we all know how big of a flop that movie was.

McFarlane's characters are dark and edgy because they need to be. If it's not going to be a musical for children, it needs to be the complete opposite.

[Captain Eo]

This really sounds like a project I would have expected Burton to take on

[thuganomic]

Sounds awesome. I've read a lot of the other Oz books, and they would translate well into films. I don't like Dorothy as a dominatrix, but the rest sounds cool.

[Protoman Version 2.5]

Like others have said, I grew up watching the Wizard of Oz and this has me pretty excited for the possible outcome. Sure it could fizzle out like a lot of potential franchises have, or, it could become a huge success. I'm hoping that middle ground found is some thing similar to a solid PG-13 at the very least as a PG would almost be not worth doing. Since the original Wizard of Oz movie is so burned into the minds of our society, doing some thing similar would never compare. But, doing some thing completely different (like the darker spin Todd wants) could give you the room of not having to worry about "living up to the old one".

Plus, from what I gather from this little bit of info and the books all being short stories, I think they are going the Sin City route. Put a handful of them in each movie and maybe help five or six of them to get every story on the silver screen and milk the franchise. Only problem I see with that is some Oz fans will be pissed if this flops before they see their favorites of the stories. Ah well, either way I'm looking forward to it.

[thuganomic]

The books are full-blown novels. I mean, they could be shortened into short stories, for sure. But knowing Hollywood, it wouldn't surprise me at all for them to stretch this Narnia style.

[Protoman Version 2.5]

Are they even still doing the rest of the Narnia movies? I've not heard any thing about that in ages.