David O. Russell bailed on Uncharted. Big time. So what’s he going to do next? Well, we have Mark Wahlberg often promoting the idea of a “Fighter 2” and we have Russell conducting secret meetings with Angelina Jolie. No, Jolie won’t be adopting a Boston accent to be Mickey Wards new love interest, rather, what this means is that David O. Russell might direct the Meleficent movie for Disney.
Wait, what?
Source: Cinemablend
Tim Burton bailed on the project last month after being attached for years, and while it’s hard to think of a director more naturally suited to the material– and more beloved by Disney right now– there are plenty of directors out there who could do something interesting with it. Russell is definitely one of them, a director who we all thought we understood after his wise-cracking and cynical movies like I Heart Huckabees and Three Kings; then he hit us all with The Fighter, a funny and exceptionally warm-hearted sports and family drama the proved just how many tricks he’s got left up his sleeve.
That would be an interesting choice. Not one I would see coming considering that Disney has been openly loving Tim Burton and his direction of their live action efforts. I can’t imagine what he would bring to the table of a movie about Maleficent after all these months of Burton imagery dancing in my head. I’ll let this one simmer on the ‘radar’ on a low flame and see what bubbles up.
In the meantime, Russell also mentions his Wahlberg/Pesci/DeNiro Uncharted plans that are no longer happening:
What can I say, I waded into those waters of the tentpole movies, and I wrote what I wanted to write, and I feel like I wrote my vision. And the rest is up to those guys. I can’t pick for those guys. I don’t know what they want to do over there. It’s just a parting of the ways creatively.
Uncharted is big business for Sony and with the cynics of the internet not at all satisfied with the ideas that Russell presented, it’s possible that feedback may have been a factor in him no longer being associated with the picture. Either way, the internetz can return to their various petitions, gravatars, forum postings, and scathing e-mails demanding that Nathan Fillion be chosen for the coveted role of Nathan Drake.
