It’s been fifteen years since it was first announced that David Fincher would be tackling an adaptation of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea for Disney. The project didn’t move forward, and Fincher explained why while speaking with Letterboxd. Long story short, Fincher quickly realized that Disney wasn’t on the same page.
“Look, I really wanted to do Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea because what we had in mind was really kind of gross and cool and wet and steampunk and all that,” Fincher said. “But I got to do [Love, Death & Robots episode] ‘Bad Travelling’ on Netflix, and that scratched that itch. I was fine just doing that. You can’t make people be excited about the risks that you’re excited about. Disney was in a place where they were saying, ‘We need to know that there’s a thing that we know how to exploit snout to tail, and you’re going to have to check these boxes for us.’“
Fincher continued, “And I was like, ‘You’ve read Jules Verne, right?’ [Laughs] This is a story about an Indian prince who has real issues with white imperialism, and that’s what we want to do. And they were like, ‘Yeah, yeah, fine. As long as there’s a lot less of that in it.’ So you get to a point where you go, ‘Look, I can’t fudge this, and I don’t want you to discover at the premiere what it is that you’ve financed. It doesn’t make any sense because it’s just going to be pulling teeth for the next two years.’ And I don’t want to do that. I mean, life’s too short.” Indeed it is. As much as I would have loved to have seen Fincher’s take on Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, I can appreciate that he didn’t want another awful studio experience after Alien 3.
Speaking of Fincher, the long-awaited release of Se7en on 4K Ultra HD will officially drop tomorrow. Our own Chris Bumbray recently watched an IMAX screening of the remastered film and was blown away revisiting the film thirty years after its original release.