Though he’d been loosely attached to the project for a while now, Tim Burton has decided that he doesn’t want to direct Maleficent, Disney’s new take on the Sleeping Beauty tale that focuses on the evil witch instead of the princess.
The Mouse House was looking to get the** Alice In Wonderland **director to bring his box office-boosting magic to the new, live action version of the story, hiring Alice writer Linda Woolverton to crank out the script, which was being aimed at Angelina Jolie starring as the cackling, green-skinned woman who has to propensity to morph into a huge dragon when the moment calls for it.
But despite the fact that Burton passed on the idea, Disney isn’t throwing the project back into limbo and is even now hunting around for a director to sweep in and awaken it with a kiss. According to the Heat Vision Blog, one of the people being considered is Harry Potter stalwart David Yates, who certainly knows a thing or two about handling magic in movies. Question is, would he want to commit to another story of sorcery so soon after finally getting the smell of Hogwarts’ burning rubble out of his hair?
As for TB, he’s busy making Dark Shadows for Warner Bros., but hasn’t left Disney completely – he’s also still overseeing the stop-motion feature version of his **Frankenweenie **short film...