We heard a few months back in the summer that Reese Witherspoon had come aboard Disney’s Wish List, leading the film as a career-driven woman whose childhood dreams are granted twenty-five years late.
THR now report that Disney are moving ahead nicely with the project, hiring the Emmy-winning writing team of Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger to pen the script.
The film will see,
“an overly imaginative little girl who makes ten wishes at a wishing well. They don’t come true because her coin never reached the bottom and eventually she loses her inner child and becomes a full grown and ambitious career woman. Some 25 years later, the coin is dislodged, falls to the bottom and she has to deal with the ramifications of 10 kid wishes coming true all at once.”
Aibel and Berger’s credits are pretty impressive, including both Kung Fu Panda films, as well as DreamWorks’ Monsters vs. Aliens, for which Witherspoon lent her voice, all of which have done really well at the box office. Wish List will be their first fully live-action feature film, and I’m looking forward to seeing it take shape. As much as I’m probably not the film’s target demographic, I think it should be a good film for all ages, even if it’s billed as a family comedy/fantasy.
Wish List was originally set up at Disney ten years ago, and was at that time intended to be a vehicle for a male lead. Now that Witherspoon’s signed on, the project will naturally be taking a new direction, and Aibel and Berger sound like solid choices to pen the script for the newly reimagined film.
The plan is for the writers to get working on Wish List after completing the adaptation of Hasbro’s board-game, Candyland, with an expected release date sometime in 2013. We’ll next be seeing Witherspoon opposite Tom Hardy and Chris Pine in McG’s This Means War next February, which should also be a great film, albeit for a totally different audience.
