Gavin O’Connor To Direct Sony’s ‘Neverland’

It’s been in development since March of last year, but it looks like the Sony acquired project ‘Neverland’ now has a director. THR is reporting that Gavin O’Connor is in talks to take the helm of this Peter Pan project.

O’Connor directed last year’s mixed martial arts film ‘Warrior’ which earned Nick Nolte an Oscar nod as well as the inspirational Disney film ‘Miracle’ about the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team and their gold medal win. This time around, he’ll be directing a revision of the classic JM Barrie story.

Previously known as ‘Pan’ and ‘Peter Pan Begins,’ ‘Neverland’ is said to be an origin story of Peter Pan and Captain Hook. The original idea was the brain child of Channing Tatum (‘GI Joe: Retailiation’, ‘The Vow’, ’21 Jump Street’), Reid Carolin and Eric Bromberg who brought the idea to Joe Roth (‘Alice in Wonderland’, ‘Maleficent’, ‘Snow White and the Huntsman’) and his company Roth Films. Billy Ray (‘The Hunger Games’) wrote the script and sold it to Sony. Originally it was thought that Tatum would be starring in the film, but his reps are now saying he will only be producing.

Now if this sounds vaguely familiar to you, maybe it’s because the Syfy channel did their own origin tale of Peter Pan last summer in their miniseries coincidently named ‘Neverland.’ Or it could be that it sounds like the Guillermo del Toro produced version called ‘Pan’ that has Aaron Eckhart (‘The Dark Knight’, ‘Battle Los Angeles’, ‘I, Frankenstein’) as Captain Hook, AnnaSophia Robb (‘Soul Surfer’, ‘Race to Witch Mountain’, ‘Spy School’) as Wendy and Sean Bean (‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy, ‘Mirror, Mirror’) as Smee which is also said to be an origin tale.

Since the project is still considered in development, no date of when production will begin or when the movie will come out has been made. Peter Pan has always been a favorite tale among many so the concept does have potential as well as a built in audience. It will be interesting to see the way the storyline plays out. Hopefully as it gets closer to actually being made, we’ll learn more of the plot.

In the meantime, would you see this film or are you already oversaturated with the amount of fairy tales permeating on both the big and small screens?