Emily Browning replaces Mia Wasikowska in Julia Leigh's "Erotic Fairy Tale" SLEEPING BEAUTY

Emily Browning (The Univited, Lemony Snicket's) has replaced fellow up and coming Australian actress Mia Wasikowska (Defiance, Alice In Wonderland) in the potentially controversial sex-dramaSleeping Beauty -- the directorial debut of writer Julia Leigh.

Leigh's 2008 Black Listed script, not to be confused with the classic fairy tale, is described as "a haunting erotic fairy tale about a student who drifts into prostitution and finds her niche as a woman who sleeps, drugged, in a 'Sleeping Beauty chamber' while men do to her what she can‘t remember the next morning."

Browning is becoming the go-to-girl for the 11th hour. She was a last minute replacement for Amanda Seyfried, who due to scheduling conflicts had to drop out of Zack Snyder's girl-powered actioner Sucker Punch. 

The reasons for Wasikowska's departure is unreported, but its presumably for more lucrative offers, coming off of the title role in Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland as well as Lisa Chodolenko's Sundance sensation The Kids Are All Right,  and will star in Gus Van Sant's RestlessandCary Fukunaga's Jane Eyre. Maybe, and this is just a wild guess, Mia will be teaming back up with Tim Burton for Maleficent, Disney's spin-off of Sleeping Beauty, and doesn't wants to avoid confusion between the two projects. But Wasikowska seems to be using her breakout Blockbuster role to have her pick of indie films, which is a good way of avoiding over exposure.

I don't know how to pose the question to myself, "who would I rather see play a prostitute?" It's easy to see this movie causing a whole lotta controversy. But I will say that I think Browning is a talented (and an outrageously beautiful) actress, and I'd actually like to see her in more commercially successful films. I thought she'd have a franchise on her hands with Lemony Snicket's, that is before it underperformed at the box-office.

Lensing for Sleeping Beauty will begin in Australia next month with a $10 million budget.

What do you think of the casting switch up for SLEEPING BEAUTY? What do you think of Sleeping Beauty's subject matter?