The giant roulette wheel that Sam Raimi uses to pick his next directing assignment appears to have stopped firmly at Disney’s much-touted Oz: The Great and Powerful, with Deadline confident that he’s committed to making the movie starting early next year.
Raimi has been linked to the film, which chronicles the Wizard’s time in Oz before Dorothy arrives and spoils his fun, for a while now. But his name has always been in contention with several other possible directors, including Sam Mendes, Adam Shankman and Timur Bekmambetov. Plus there was the chance that he could drop out of the running to focus on one of the other projects he's been developing, most notably a World of Warcraft film.
But now that he’s on board, there’s a chance that Robert Downey Jr, long rumoured to be interested in the lead role, could actually finally commit. Apparently he’s taken some convincing, but has liked what Raimi offered while he was still just tweaking the script. And part of that was hiring Pulitzer Prize-scooping playwright David Lindsay-Abaire, who has toiled on the likes of Robots and an adaptation of his own work, Rabbit Hole, which is generating healthy Oscar buzz for Nicole Kidman. Oh, and a less- publicised recent job? Polishing the script for Raimi’s planned Spider-Man 4. So at least we know they can work together (even if that film came to nothing).
It’s also good news for the Mouse House, since locking in a director means that it should be able to have another Alice in Wonderland-level spectacle out soon, and in advance of the approximately 500 other Oz-flavoured projects currently bubbling away in the Hollywood soup. With the likes of Wicked and at least one reboot of The Wizard of Oz itself in the works, it’s looking crowded out there.