Pinochio remains one of Disney’s very best animated movies, and also one of their darkest. It’s doubtful that any remake could ever match it, but there have been quite a few attempts since 1939, most of them for TV though not all of them, and now we have another. Apparently Robert Downey Jr has been developing a Pinocchio live-action movie at Warner Bros for some time already, and it’s gone through several writers and directors. Jane Goldman, Michael Mitnick and Bryan Fuller have already had a go at screenplays, while Ben Stiller and Paul Thomas Anderson were due to direct it at one point. Now, it seems that Apollo 13 and Rush director Ron Howard may be the man who will be helming the project. He’s expected to bring in a writer of his own for one more draft before shooting.
Supposedly this version will focus more on the Geppetto angle of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio story, and look at what happens to him when he tries to find his missing puppet-son who will now be all grown up. I would be more enthusiastic about this project it they decided to follow the book rather than more Maleficent-style revisionism, though it could make comparisons to the cartoon less easy, which is probably a good thing.
What is interesting is that last year Disney announced that they were going to make a Pinocchio film, so we could end up with two films featuring the wooden boy sometime this year or the next….
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