David Fincher Choosing 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea Instead Of Dragon Tattoo Sequels?

[Brendon Connelly]

While it's increasingly clear that Sony want to get The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest up on screen, it's not so obvious quite how it's going to happen. Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara are both contracted to reprise their roles in the sequels, but as is par for the course, the studio only signed director David Fincher for the first installment.

As Fincher himself said, "Classically, movie studios don?t make deals with directors... they want to make sure you behave."

So the ball is very much in his court.

According to unnamed sources, cited by The Playlist, Fincher would rather take up an adaptation of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea as his next project. He's been working on it for a while, and there's currently a new draft of the screenplay being worked up by Andrew Kevin Walker, following Scott Z. Burns. Fincher's plan, reportedly, is to get the film into production in the last quarter of the year.

Which means he'd be just wrapped when Sony want their second Millennium movie to start rolling.

There's bound to be a lot of heavy post-production on an FX film like 20,000 Leagues so unless Fincher can be talked into pulling a Spielberg* or perhaps a Danny Boyle** then something is going to have to give.

It may come down to Sony deciding which is more important: the director they want, or the schedule they want.

*Spielberg carried out post production on Jurassic Park while shooting Schindler's List and the films were released just a few months apart. Something similar has just occurred with Tintin and War Horse.

**Danny Boyle will leave his film Trance on the shelf at the end of shooting, returning to edit it once he's done with his commitments to the 2012 Olympics.

[Red Scharlach]

I sure hope he goes with that.

[bottleHeD]

Maybe he should just hand it over to Spielberg or Boyle.