Given her well documented objection to anyone – and particularly Disney – adapting her stories into other media, we can’t imagine P.L. Travers, were she alive today, would be thrilled to learn that the Mouse House is returning to the Mary Poppins well. But it’s true:** Into The Woods**’ Rob Marshall is developing a new film about the character.
According to Entertainment Weekly, the studio and filmmakers (including Marshall’s Woods collaborators John DeLuca and Mark Platt) have been working with the Travers estate and already have the backing of Poppins co-songwriter Richard Sherman. He won’t be providing the main music this time, however; that job falls to Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman.
As for the source material? The team is sticking with Travers’ tales: the Poppins stories expand beyond the original tome across a book series that ran between 1934 and 1988; the 1964 original only drew from the first instalment. The new story will reportedly find Mary returning to the Banks family in Depression-era London, at least once a scriptwriter has been hired to work out the bits between the songs. It’s still early days, so there’s no date for this yet, but expect Disney to push ahead with this with alacrity.