New Snow White Film

Reader Margaret shared this one with me, which I had missed...

From Fairy Tales Are Hot! Relativity Media Acquires New Version of 'Snow White' by Mike Fleming:

Relativity Media has made a preemptive acquisition of The Brothers Grimm: Snow White, an edgy 3D re-imagining of the German folk tale written by Melisa Wallack.

Deal follows an upfront seven-figure Disney pitch deal for Devil Wears Prada scribe Aline Brosh McKenna to script a re-imagining of Cinderella. Disney also is moving quickly on The Great and Powerful Oz, with Adam Shankman and Timur Bekmambetov circling. Sam Mendes just dropped out of consideration, but there is rumor that Guillermo del Toro might meet on the project now that he's free of The Hobbit. Warner Bros and New Line each have version of Oz that are based on the public domain books by L. Frank Baum.

All of the incarnations of Snow White are based on the German folk tale, but this one hews closely to the distillation by the Grimm Brothers.

"This is not your grandfather's Snow White," Ratner said. "Melisa went back to the 500 year old folk tale and put in some of the things that were missing from Walt Disney's film. His dwarves were miners, and here they are robbers. There is also a dragon that was in the original folk tale. Walt made one of the great movies of all time, but ours is edgy and there is more comedy. The original, made for its time, was soft compared to what we're going to do."

Said Kavanaugh: "This is a project we've aggressively pursued and believe in. We love Melisa Wallack's script and her fresh take on the classic story we all grew up on. This film will bring together fans of the original fair tale and draw new audiences who enjoy adventure films."

So that makes Jack the Giant Killer, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and Snow White all at some level of consideration.  And Rapunzel and Beauty and the Beast are already appearing this summer.  We're definitely approaching another swarm of fairy tale films!  Now we need some Hollywood type to consider Twelve Dancing Princesses and East of the Sun, West of the Moon.  What fairy tale do you wish would appear on film?

And, ha!, "back to the original story" by the Grimms.  Well, the news reporting is a little off since the Grimms are not 500 years old, for one.  And the versions described in their notes do not have a dragon.  Many other variants from other countries have robbers however.  Etc, etc.  See Annotations for Snow White, for example.  But it will be fun to see what they do with the story...  and it appears the writer has done some homework unlike the promoters who are just out to create buzz, accuracy not considered.

Thanks for sharing Margaret!