Henry Selick Reacquires Cancelled Movie Rights For THE SHADOW KING From Disney

Henry Selick has directed some really amazing and trippy movies. The Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach, Coraline, and most recently Wendell & Wild have all been brought to us by Selick, though he often gets overlooked for Tim Burton.

Selick recently sat down with Double Toasted on YouTube to talk about his career and mentioned that he has reacquired the rights to The Shadow King from Disney. The movie seemed doomed, it suffered budget issues and creative differences with a studio that didn’t quite know how to handle the film. You’d think after watching Coraline they would know what they were in for with The Shadow King, but Selick describes the movie like this:

Guess what? I got the rights back from Disney and maybe if... [Wendell & Wild] is considered a success, maybe I'll revive The Shadow King... It'd be different, it'd be like my original story, which they claimed they loved, but then changed everything in it... in my mind it was sort of like a darker in tone Dumbo. You know, Dumbo is made fun of for his big ears and turns out, 'my god, that elephant can fly', well this was a kid with deformed hands and maybe they're not as cute as big ears and that was their problem, but that's a really messed up thing. He's gonna get taught by a living shadow girl how to use those hands to not only make the greatest hand shadows in the world, but hand shadows that can come to life. I thought that was a good story and still think it is.

It sounds like it could be a really fun and bizarre film to watch given Selick’s stop motion style. The cast originally included Jaden Betts, Brendan Gleeson, Jeffrey Tambor, and Catherine O'Hara which is a great cast but may not be the cast for the final film if the project is able to move forward. Hopefully the early success of Wendell & Wild can help propel The Shadow King towards being made. 

Source: ScreenRant