Netflix hires writer for Alice in Wonderland/Wizard of Oz crossover

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Stories from the "Alice in Wonderland" and "Wizard of Oz" canon have been told time and time again across decades of film, through reboots and sequels, TV shows and big-budget blockbusters. Some would say there’s nothing left to mine from the stories, but Netflix is hoping to find a different spin with the new movie DOROTHY AND ALICE and has hired screenwriter Anna Klassen to write the story about a magical friendship between Oz’s Dorothy and Wonderland’s Alice.

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Klassen first landed on Hollywood’s radar with her script WHEN LIGHTNING STRIKES, a biopic about “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling that landed on the 2017 Black List and 2017 Hit List. An initial draft for DOROTHY AND ALICE was written by Justin Merz (Disney’s ROSE RED), and word is Klassen will rework the script with Bryan Unkeless (I, TONYA) producing via his Clubhouse Pictures banner.

Taking to Twitter to confirm the news, Klassen posted, “The Cheshire Cat is out of the bag: I’m writing Dorothy & Alice for Netflix, a fantasy adventure epic. I grew up reading these books & this project has been endlessly fun to craft – to reinvent treasured characters and explore the worlds I wanted to inhabit as a kid.”

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Per Collider, Netflix wants Klassen to take the things in a new direction from the original story in Merz’s script. That story found Dorothy plagued by nightmares of Oz’s destruction, and is “sent to a home for others like her who experience troubling, vivid dreams, she soon befriends Alice, a mysterious girl who involves her in a perilous quest to not only save the worlds of imagination, but the world as we know it.”

Starting off as an entertainment journalist, Klassen’s Rowling script focused on the author’s life — including her depression, unemployment and more — leading to her writing the iconic series of boy wizard books. Her work landed her several meetings across town and is developing other projects with Netflix as well.

The premise of the original story sounds like fun fodder for an adventure starring two iconic characters, and while the story has apparently changed with this new announcement perhaps it could still have that same core. On that note, we have no idea if it will have more fantastical leanings, or if it will be a more serious, grounded exploration of friendship. My hope is that it's somehow a merger of the two, as the characters do have shared experiences that could make for a quirky study of their personalities, and one that's not afraid to get a little weird. With all they've experienced, a little high strangeness seems like something the characters could handle.