Ava DuVernay Will Direct Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time For Disney
Selma director Ava DuVernay has been courted for several high-profile films but has chosen the adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time, the 1963 Newbery Medal-winning novel by Madeleine L’Engle, as her next project.
A Wrinkle in Time was among the projects DuVernay was being sought for but Deadline now says it’s official.
“Deadline revealed February 8 that DuVernay had been offered this film and was also in the mix at DreamWorks for Intelligent Life, a sci-fi thriller scripted by Colin Trevorrow and his Jurassic World collaborator Derek Connolly,” they write. “A Wrinkle in Time was first to close and it is the culmination of six months of courtship by Disney Motion Pictures president Sean Bailey and exec Tendo Nagenda.”
[Editor’s Note: affiliate links] L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time is a classic sci-fi/fantasy classic which features a young girl named Meg as the protagonist. Her father up and disappears to another dimension after work on tesseracts and she and a few friends wind up on an adventure to find him. A television movie was made from the story in 2003 but it has never been adapted for the big screen. It was however adapted into graphic novel format last year with art by Hope Larson.
Frozen‘s writer and co-director, Jennifer Lee, has written the screenplay for the project and I can personally say I’m excited to see two talented women attached to this important film.
DuVernay had previously turned down work on the Marvel superhero film Black Panther (Ryan Coogler was eventually hired). She said she saw the value in the project but ultimately decided against attaching herself to it for what would likely be three years of her professional life. The Hollywood Reporter reported her saying, “What my name is on means something to me — these are my children. This is my art. This is what will live on after I’m gone. So it’s important to me that that be true to who I was in this moment. And if there’s too much compromise, it really wasn’t going to be an Ava DuVernay film.”
Director J.J. Abrams has also put forth DuVernay’s name to possibly direct a Star Wars film saying she would “kill it.” While the size, scope, and corporate control of that franchise is equal, if not larger than, the Marvel universe, I could see A Wrinkle in Time being a great audition for the job.