Disney has big bucks riding on next spring's blockbuster adaptation of Frank L. Baum's "Wizard of Oz" inception story, with Sam Raimi taking the reins on what I hope will be something really special. Raimi was allotted nearly two years of total production time to bring Oz back to the big screen in a whole new incarnation (no ruby slippers in this baby!), plenty of time for magic to happen, and the cast he's assembled is pretty darned exciting. While we still have nine months before "Oz" actually opens, this first official poster for "Oz, The Great and Powerful" is all kinds of magical, a dreamscape tease that raises the bar for anticipation considerably.
James Franco plays a floundering circus magician whose hot air balloon gets spirited away from the Kansas skies during one of those blasted tornado-portal storms the state is famous for, landing in the fantastical world of Oz (and eventually becoming that old fraud of a man behind the curtain who made Dorothy and her friends all those empty promises in "The Wizard of Oz"). So yeah, this is essentially a prequel, but emphatically not to the beloved Technicolor original, not in an official capacity anyway. There are familiar witches, of course - Rachel Weisz & Mila Kunis fill the younger shoes of wicked witches West/East, and Michelle Williams (!!!!!!) plays Glinda, the Good Witch.
This last bit of casting news has filled my heart with all kinds of geekgasmic delight, and I can't wait to see what Williams, the best actress of my generation, does with such an iconically sugar-sweet role, and for Disney, no less.
While it'll likely be a few more months before a trailer drops, lets cross our fingers that the marketing peeps at Disney toss us a few gorgeous production stills sooner than later, because this painterly poster promises a rapturous escapist fantasy that frankly seems too good to be true. An official image of Michelle Williams, wand in hand and cloaked in candy-colored costume regalia, is all it would take for me to be a true believer.
Until then, the musty memory of Disney's last revisionist fairy tale "prequel" -- Tim Burton's creatively anemic and aesthetically depressing "Alice in Wonderland" (which naturally became a billion-dollar box office phenom) -- remains floating in the rear view, the ghost of a turd. Those billion bucks are, of course, the only reason Raimi's "Oz" was greenlit in the first place, with Disney positioning it for release the exact same weekend, three years later, that "Alice" opened to more than $100 million.
Whether Raimi's vision of Oz, as dictated by the ever-changing top guard of Disney suits, turns out to be spectacular or just spectacularly sucky, "Oz, The Great and Powerful" will surely live up to its name commercially when it opens March 8, 2013. Having learned their lesson the hard way (whitewhine.com) with the unbranded mega-budget "John Carter," with whom audiences were unfamiliar on a household name basis for a century before its notoriously floppy release last March, the studio already has Angelina Jolie as Sleeping Beauty's nemesis queen "Maleficent" set for the March 14, 2014, so Disney is clearly confident that March means money for branded fairy tale reboots.
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