It’s been a long time since Pirates of the Caribbean first hit theaters, and it proved that a theme park ride, of all things, could be adapted into a movie.
There’s quite a few theme park rides still on deck to be made into movies, just like there’s a ton of board game and video game movies in the works too.
Now one of them that I’m particularly interested in is Magic Kingdom. There’s actually several cool areas of Disneyland that could make good movies, I’m excited about Guillermo Del Toro doing a Haunted Mansion movie, still love that ride, and Magic Kingdom could be cool because of the talent involved.
Jon Favreau will be directing, and Michael Chabon, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Cavalier and Clay and one of the screenwriters who contributes to the Spider-Man series, will be writing the script.
Favereau had a couple of misses recently, including Iron Man 2 and Cowboys and Aliens, but he is indeed a good director, and I think he’ll be back up to speed in no time.
So Favreau talked to Collider about the film, and he’s also up to direct the film version of Jersey Boys, but he mentioned to the site that he doesn’t want to rush Magic Kingdom. In fact, the really cool news is he’s doing Magic Kingdom with Pixar.
As Favreau said, “What we’ve been doing is writing a script, going up to Pixar, meeting with the brain trust, bringing on artists, story editors, and putting it together as though it were an animated film so that by the time we actually film it, we’ll have a rock solid story.”
In fact, screenwriting teachers often tell you to look at Pixar films, because their storytelling skills are extraordinary. (Favreau calls them “kings of story.”)
So what is magic Kingdom going to be exactly? “It’s going to be a family in the park,” Favreau relates. “It’s an alternate reality version of the park that they get launced into. So much of it is just how it weaves together as a tapestry and what the visuals look like in creating this rich world. It’s informed by everything that I remember and know about the park from going there since I was a small child.”
