Two 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea updates in the works, but only one has David Fincher

By Sean O'Neal | May 17, 2010 | 5:23pm

Aux Features Film

Because there’s nothing like a little healthy competition to exhaust audiences on a premise years before your movie is even released, rival updates of Jules Verne’s classic 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea are said to be in the works, both at two different studios and under two very different creative teams. Disney’s original plans for a Leagues update—an “origin story” for Captain Nemo, to be helmed by McG—were very publicly abandoned last year, but the project has taken on new life thanks to David Fincher, who lobbied the studio to let him tackle it. Fincher is said to currently be in negotiations with The Informant! screenwriter Scott J. Burns to draft his own take.

And since Verne’s 1896 novel is officially in the public domain, there’s nothing—save humility—to stop Ridley Scott and brother Tony Scott from developing their own version over at Fox, which The Hollywood Reporter ’s Heat Vision blog speculates may be “set in the future” and could be helmed by Wanted director Timur Bekmambetov from a script by Clash Of The Titans co-writer Travis Beacham. The reasoning here is supposedly that “a sci-fi take on the material may be more accessible than a period one”—a theory that could be put to a quantifiable test if and when Fincher’s version makes it to the theaters.