Tim Burton teams with Kazuo Ishiguro for secret, whimsical World War II project

The Nobel Prize-winning author of Never Let Me Go has an adaptation of his book Klara And The Sun, directed by Taika Waititi, hitting theaters this month.

By Matt Schimkowitz  |  October 15, 2026 | 2:54pm
(Photo by Ernesto Ruscio/Getty Images)
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Tim Burton teams with Kazuo Ishiguro for secret, whimsical World War II project

With the remains of Wednesday season three recently completed, Tim Burton is looking for a new project to spiralize. The series lit a fire under Burton, who’s seemingly back in the public’s good graces after shepherding the Jenna Ortega-led Addams Family reboot onto Netflix. Following the near half-billion-dollar box office of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, which was Burton’s best-reviewed movie in years, he’s teaming up with a Nobel Prize-winning author to come up with some striped-shirt-wearing characters for his next project. Per Deadline, Burton is developing a film project with Kazuo Ishiguro, the author of The Remains Of The Day and Never Let Me Go. 

Ishiguro, who is a week out from the release of the Taika Waititi-directed adaptation of his book Klara And The Sun, would write the Burton movie, which Deadline‘s sources report is set in post-World War II Japan. The author did not write the upcoming Klara movie. Academy Award-winning screenwriter Waititi and Mad Men and Halt And Catch Fire writer Dahvi Waller handled the script for that long-delayed movie. However, Ishiguro has written a few screenplays in his day, including the 2022 Ikiru remake Living starring Bill Nighy.

This isn’t the only intriguing Burton project on the horizon. He’s still working on an Attack Of The 50 Foot Woman remake starring Margot Robbie and written by Gillian Flynn. It seems like a perfect marriage of project and talent, but so did Alice In Wonderland. 

 
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