Oz The Great and Powerful narrows down its directors

The success of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, which basically put a different spin on the classic tale that audiences love, has sparked an interest in the House of Mouse. Now Disney is quickly putting together a cast and crew for the prequel to The Wizard of Oz called Oz The Great and Powerful. The director’s list for the upcoming production is slowly but surely narrowing down to a couple of key people, including the recent addition of Timur Bekmambetov. The Wanted director is just one of three people the powerful studio is eyeballing, the other two being Sam Mendes and Adam Shankman.

Deadline reports that if Disney does not succeed in getting Bekmambetov to go into the director’s chair for Oz, that they’ll try to woo him over to do a feature version of Jungle Cruise. Yes, they are trying to put together a film based off the ride that you find at their amusement parks. Granted, Pirates of the Caribbean is doing wonderfully box-office wise does not mean that it’ll happen every time (example: Haunted Mansion). Now it’s just a matter of waiting to hear whether or not Bekmambetov wants to jump on this production.

Here’s what the story is about below from The Playlist.:

Based on one of the many Frank Baum books, and a prequel to the Wizard of Oz, but told from the wizard’s point of view when he first enters Oz, 50 years before Dorothy. The Wizard is a young womanizing con artist who arrives in the land of Oz accidentally, and is mistaken to be a Wizard, playing along hoping to reap the riches of Oz, only to be thrown into a civil war of a royal family of three young women who later become the witches – 2 evil and 1 good.