Last month, when it emerged that Sony had picked Easy A’s Will Gluck to re-write and direct the Will Smith/Jay Z-driven update of Annie, we noted that Willow Smith had aged out of the role and wondered how long it would be before someone called Beasts Of The Southern Wild’s Quvenzhané Wallis. Turns out it was less than a month, as she’s now landed the role.

Wallis, who leapt off the screen with her memorable performance in Benh Zeitlin’s Oscar-nominated film, will take on the role of the warbling young orphan for whom life is a series of hard knocks. Until, that is, she meets “Daddy” Oliver Warbucks.

Smith and Jay-Z have been trying to get this one up and singing for a while now, and the movie has passed through the word processors of Emma Thompson and Aline Brosh McKenna on its path to the screen.

Now the update of Thomas Meehan, Charles Strouse and Martin Charnin’s movie musical script (most famously directed by John Huston in 1982) should finally be able to start shooting for a release in 2014. But we may not have to wait that long to see Wallis back on our screens – she’s got a role in Steve McQueen’s latest film, Twelve Years A Slave, which arrives in September across the pond.