Kenneth Branagh to Direct ARTEMIS FOWL For Disney
It looks like Disney Studios and The Weinstein Company are ready to move forward on their big screen adaptation of Artemis Fowl. According to The Tracking Board, the studio has signed Thor and Cinderella director Kenneth Branagh to develop the project, which is based on the book series by Eoin Colfer.
Branagh is a talented director and I loved what he did with both Thor and Cinderella. The guy has a great talent for bringing these kinds of fantastical worlds to life, which makes Artemis Fowl the perfect project for him.
Artemis Fowl was pitched to the studios as Harry Potter meets Die Hard. The fantasy story follows the "brilliant and cunning 12-year-old eponymous criminal mastermind Artemis Fowl II, whose cunning plot to extort gold from the secret Fairy People puts him directly in the cross-hairs of some of the most dangerous creatures on earth. Over the series, Fowl becomes a sort of anti-hero rather than a full-fledged villain, often having to work together with the fairies to stop a slew of treacherous megalomaniacs."
This sounds like it could be a really cool and exciting movie. The project has had a long road to the big screen. Over the course of fourteen years, it has gone through ten writers and two directors. The most recent version of the script came from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix scribe Michael Goldenberg. According to Variety, though, the studio is now in talks with Conor McPherson (The Eclipse) to write the movie.
When the project was initially announced at Disney, the plan was for the first Artemis Fowl movie to be based on the first and second installments in the book series, Artemis Fowl and Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident. There's no word on if that is still the plan with Branagh on board.
Before Branagh starts working on Artemis Fowl, he will direct a big screen adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express.