Director Candidates For Ouija Board Movie Extend To 'The Losers' Director Sylvain White And 'Priest' Director Scott Stewart
Last week there was word that Pierre Morel, the director of District 13, Taken, and From Paris with Love, had been named as "a lead candidate" to helm Universal's Ouija, based on the Hasbro board game. Now two more filmmakers have entered the mix: Sylvain White, director of Stomp the Yard, The Losers and the DTV effort I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer, and Scott Stewart, director of Legion and the upcoming Priest.
Deadline says the studio is talking to other directors as well, but those are the three main contenders. They also add that a decision will have to be made in the next two weeks, since each of the directors is also up for other gigs. Which gigs specifically? We know Pierre Morel has a Dune remake on the horizon, and as for the other two, White has been linked to adaptations of Frank Miller's comic series Ronin and the video game Castlevania, and Stewart has been setting up the action thriller Psy-Ops. So whichever one of them ends up getting the job, expect to see their respective films put on hold.
The usual Platinum Dunes team (Michael Bay, Brad Fuller and Andrew Form) is producing the film, and they're teaming up with Hasbro's Brian Goldner and Bennett Schneir. Tron: Legacy scribes Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis wrote the script. Production is planned to start next summer, for a Thanksgiving 2012 release. Its budget is set around $80 million to $100 million, because as Fuller has previously stated, it's going to be...
A huge movie. That's a big, big, big thing. ... It's more of a, like, Pirates of the Caribbean adventure story, with a Ouija board at the center of it. There are definitely horror elements, because it's about Ouija and what happens from an Ouija board, but it's a much bigger film. I would call it an action-adventure with horror elements.
Out of the directors mentioned to helm this bad boy, my vote goes to Scott Stewart. Not because I think he's especially talented, but because then he'd have directed three movies in a row with titles consisting of single words with six letters or less. And that, hopefully, puts into perspective just how little I care about a Ouija movie.
Your thoughts?