There has been a lot going on in Todd McFarlane’s world lately, about his new Spawn film, a new Spawn animated series and about Dakota Fanning being cast as Dorothy in his incarnation of ‘The Wizard of Oz’ and a few of his projects.

I always take what McFarlane says with about 6 billion grains of salt, as some of these projects have been talked about for what seems like aeons now and have never really come to fruition. So, take from this what you will – Empire recently asked him about his Wizard of Oz film and this is what he had to say.

McFarlane on the start date being early next year:

We’re in Hollywood, so you have to predicate all statements of that sort with “our intent would be…” I’m sure the higher-ups at Warner Bros. would like to have it on their schedule, and they’re probably moving in that direction. But we’ve seen in our lifetime thousands of cases where things don’t go according to plan, right?

On the state of the script:

They’re on their second iteration right now, trying to get it into a zone that makes sense. Josh Olsen wrote a draft that didn’t quite strike Warners fancy. Everyone was a little lukewarm. They wanted it more sexy! So they were going to do a rewrite and get some fresh eyes on it.

On the story being based around Dorothy’s granddaughter:

The first draft had those elements. Will they remain? Can’t be sure.

On filming in Britain:

That’s putting the cart before the horse. That depends on what kind of budget comes in, where the confidence level is for the studio execs, where they’ll have the most success stretching their dollars…

On Dakota Fanning as Dorothy:

I haven’t heard that. If we just do a sugary sweet Dorothy that everybody has seen over and over for 50 years, as far as I’m concerned, that’s too obvious. I’m happy to go with whoever will get the most people in the seats, but sometimes that can change from month to month.

On going “dark”:

I think my “Twisted” version is a little scary for Warners to embrace. I essentially pitched Lord of the Rings. It was big, it was bold and it wasn’t a very pretty place. It was badass! There’s no Baum in it at all. When they bought it from me, my thing was, turn off the MGM mindset. It’s a public domain property, let’s go invent some cool new ideas, which basically will surprise people. What’s going to get a new generation to go look at Oz is if you reinvent it on some level. Not every single level, but some of them have to be new. Shut down your preconceived notions. For me, you should be looking at an isolated movie, that, oh, by the way, happens to be Oz. To get the new audience you’re going to have to put some edges on this thing. My version would rock! But they’re all like, “We’re spending $100m here, we can’t go totally nuts, Todd!” So I’ve told them that the movie I like is the one they’re willing to make!

[RANT]

While I totally understand that ‘some’ concessions have to be made to appease studio execs morons because they want as many eyeballs glued to the screen as possible, why do they not get the fact that if they did let him do the full “Twisted” version of ‘OZ’ the theaters would be packed?

I really wish McFarlane would stick to his guns on ‘Twisted Land Of Oz’ and go as dark as the action figure series was and make it an R rated horror movie. I would prefer he just pass on it all together if he’s just going to do some watered down version. That last sentence of his just doesn’t inspire much confidence.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments.