Warner Bros. to Turn All 15 Oz Books Into Movies

Lucas123 writes "After purchasing the rights to the Oz books from Ted Turner Warner Bros., along with Village Roadshow Pictures, will be taking Spawn creator Todd McFarlane's idea to produce movies based on the Oz books. They've obtained the rights to the 14 titles written by 'The Wizard of Oz' author L. Frank Baum, as well as the the fifteenth book ('The Royal Book of Oz'), written by Ruth Plumly Thompson. Screen Writer John 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.'"

Public Domain

[tidewaterblues]

Correct me if I am wrong, but all 14 original Oz books and the MGM movie are all public domain. As long as you only base you canon on this material, you can make whatever movie you want, and you don't have to pay anyone a dime. Now, the characters name are another matter. Many of those are still trademarked by various corporations.

Re:So what you're telling me...

[K8Fan]

"Return to Oz" was a very enjoyable film on it's own merits, but the movie critics of the time were unable to judge it on those merits - and could only see it as the film that didn't have Judy Garland in it.

Tin Woodman of Oz

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a group Animation:Master [hash.com] users who have been working on a full-length, CGI production of The Tin Woodman of Oz [hash.com]. The entire project is taking place on-line. For example, here are links to the production journal [hash.com] and the image gallery [hash.com]. You can find much more additional information - clips, discussions, animatics, models - on the website.

I'd think the development of an "Open" movie - much like Blender's Elephant's Dream [elephantsdream.org] and Project Peach [blender.org] - only more ambitious, would be more interesting to Slashdot readers.

Re:So what you're telling me...

[hguorbray]

Actually there were 'scientific' slightly futuristic (for the story time frame) elements in Return to OZ -the primitive electrochock machine they were going to hook Dorothy up to in the asylum for instance. -and the Wheelers looked like some sort of skatepunks........

Having read all the Oz books as a kid I was thrilled to see a more accurate, darker picture of the land of Oz after the more saccharine MGM version. I guess I should check out 'Wicked' for the same reason

Also, Fairuza Balk, young Dorothy, went on to become quite the bad girl in movies such as 'the Craft', the disastrous remake of 'the island of Doctor Moreau and other uneven fare such as 'No FishFood in Heaven' which was notable for having stolen its plot from the Velevet Underground song 'The Gift' which was narrated by John Cale (It was now mid August and Waldo Jeffers had reached his limit....)

I'm just sayin'.....

American McGee

[Paralizer]

American McGee is supposed to be doing a film version of his video game American McGee's Alice [wikipedia.org].
There is some info about it here [imdb.com].

How will these versions compare? American's was very dark and twisted, with Alice emotionally disturbed and borderline insane. Characters were murdered and gruesome experiments were performed on the inhabitants of Wonderland.

Re:So what you're telling me...

[GrievousMistake]

How so? I read Grimm's fairy tales as a kid, and I can't recall them being unusually violent as fairy tales go. Did I get a sanitized edition?
It was a lot cleaner than, say, One Thousand and One Nights, which I also read, where people had their eyes stabbed out on a fairly regular basis.