**Update: **According to Entertainment Weekly, which spoke to the director's publicist, he took a meeting, but decided not to do it. “The reports that Robert Zemeckis is doing The Wizard of Oz are absolutely false.” So there you have it. Zemeckis has been approached for a few things recently – he briefly pondered the new Superman movie – but seems focused for now on Yellow Submarine.
Like a dark, cloud-sucking twister on the horizon, we’ve known that Warner Bros. has had a plan to remake The Wizard of Oz for a while now. And as its competitors start to line up more and more Oz-related projects, it was only a matter of time before Warners stepped up and started looking for a big name to handle a new version of the story of Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tin Man and the rest. Now Deadline reports that the studio is in talks with Robert Zemeckis.
Zemeckis seems to have made new takes on old tales his speciality recently, with Beowulf and A Christmas Carol in the past and Yellow Submarine in the future. And though he’s certainly a man of talent who can handle spectacle, we’re not certain he really needs to keep on re-working classic stories. Especially since he recently announced that he’s looking to get back into live action – we’d really like to see him tackle something original for that.
And if we’re honest, does The Wizard of Oz actually need remaking? If it’s going to be turned into a 3D spectacle, can’t the studio just crank out another fined-tuned, stereoscopically enhanced re-release of the original print? We realise that Disney has Sam Raimi developing Oz: The Great and Powerful, there's an indie animated Oz in production, musical adaptation Wicked waiting in the wings and a host of other projects looking to muscle in on the action, but surely that’s not a good enough reason to try to redo a classic?
There’s no word on whether Zemeckis will actually agree to take this on, but we’re hoping he clicks his heels together and thinks carefully before he agrees to this…