Angelina Jolie Confirms Maleficent Is Her Next Film!

Angelina Jolie has hinted to The Hollywood Reporter that her next film will be Maleficent, the Disney re-imagining of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale that features the wicked sorceress as the center of the piece.A little like Wicked, the crooked villain would likely be more sympathetic (she would have to be being the protagonist) and her descent into evil a tragic one. Jolie hasn't been seen on screen since the late 2010 misfire The Tourist which she starred alongside Johnny Depp (though her voice was heard in Kung Fu Panda 2) and she has spent 2011 working on her directorial debut In The Land of Blood and Honey. Speaking in Berlin where she is now presenting her film, the Oscar-winning actress said; "I haven't acted in two years, and I haven't done anything else since this . The next thing I am looking at is a Disney movie," Normally when an actress has been out of the spotlight for an extended period of time they seek out a major mainstream project to get them right back into the hearts and minds of audiences. It is no surprise that Jolie is looking at a Disney film to make her big screen comeback and it is the kind of showy part that has also attracted Julia Roberts and Charlize Theron, who both play similar villains in this year's two Snow White movies. Initially setup by Disney for Tim Burton to try and recapture the billion dollar Alice in Wonderland success, Maleficent is also based on a Linda Woolverton screenplay, the writer who wrote the 2010 movie that was a kind of sequel to the Lewis Carroll tale. Burton is no longer attached to direct, instead it is first time helmer Robert Stromberg, a veteran production designer who has worked on Avatar, Pirates of the Caribbean movies, The Aviator, Pan's Labyrinth and so many more diverse pictures in his long career. Interestingly he also worked on Disney's forthcoming Oz The Great and Powerful and on Alice in Wonderland... almost as if Disney have manufactured him specifically for this film. The project has wanted Angelina Jolie from the first day it was conceived and Jolie, who is being egged on by her kids to do the movie, has loved the screenplay for months. With Jolie seemingly focusing on this family friendly effort as her next acting gig it would seem to suggest that Sony's mega ambitious Cleopatra remake is on the back burner again and will have to wait for Jolie, the only film star who the studio believe can play the iconic Egyptian queen. That film's proposed director David Fincher also seems to prefer the idea of making 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea next for Disney, so Cleopatra looks like it will almost certainly be a no-go in 2012. Jolie also has snubbed Luc Besson who she was eying a thriller project to collaborate on and would have gone in front of camera's in April. Maleficent currently has no start as they were waiting on a lead but if Jolie is serious about making it and Disney can secure her signature, this one could certainly be a go project for the summer. A March 2014 date, around the same time Alice in Wonderland was released, would seem almost certainly set in stone.