David Fincher Reteams With Se7en Writer For 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA

Whatever you can do Sony, Disney can do just as well.... After Sony this week hired Eric Roth, writer of David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button to re-draft the final screenplay for the Cleopatra epic that studio head Amy Pascal will do just about anything to please David Fincher into directing next year, Disney have now hired Se7en writer Andrew Kevin Walker to put the final touches to rival project 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea that Disney similarly are desperate for Fincher to helm. Fincher's idea for a remake of the Jules Verne classic sci-fi novel about Captain Nemo creating his warship Nautilus is for an ambitious 3D, 70% CG film that would incorporate motion capture and would essentially be the biggest audience film of his career. I mean who ever thought we would be looking at a David Fincher directed movie for Disney? But the script has never totally pleased Fincher after having passed through Scott Z. Burns (Contagion, The Informant), Randall Wallace (Braveheart, We Were Soldiers), Michael Chabon (Spider-Man 2) to get to Walker. I suppose the idea was formally for McG to direct, so no wonder there was a ton of terrible ideas in the script. Now with Fincher/Walker back collaborating together, that shouldn't be much of a problem moving forward. Walker provided uncredited work on Fincher's movies Fight Club and The Game but they haven't got a film off the ground together since but two years ago they did work together on an unrealised adaptation of Max Erlich's supernatural novel The Reincarnation of Peter Proud. Both Disney and Sony have now put heavy weights on either side of the remake tug of war for Fincher and over the next few weeks we should find out which had the bigger pulling force. Both are somewhat surprising projects for Fincher to attach himself too but then again we said the exact same thing about The Social Network and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo...