Guy Ritchie, who famously helped turn books about an English detective whose weapons were logic and reason into a movie franchise about fistfights, bromance, and explosions, has been hired to do similar with the gloriously public-domain pirate classic, Treasure Island. God I hope Taylor Lautner plays Jim Hawkins.
Warner Bros has attached Guy Ritchie to direct a new version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s pirate tale Treasure Island, and has set Alex Harakis to write the script. Ritchie will produce the film with his partner Lionel Wigram and Langley Park’s Kevin McCormick. It was Wigram who originally set up a stylized version of the classic novel, much the way he did Sherlock Holmes, which Ritchie directed. [Deadline]
The obvious choice here would be to have Robert Downey Jr. play the lead and just swing through the frame stealing dinner rolls from fusty aristocrats and winking at people, but they kind of already did that with Johnny Depp and it was called Pirates of the Caribbean. I guess you could modernize it, or turn it into a rom-com, but then it’d be National Treasure, or that Matthew McConaughey movie. Or they could stay faithful to the book, or make it over-the-top and ridiculous, but then it’d just be SyFy’s Treasure Island miniseries with Eddie Izzard and Frodo, or Michael Bay’s Treasure Island prequel for Starz. I guess what I’m saying is, there aren’t a lot of options for originality here. My suggestion? Just make it an adaptation of a Long John Silver’s restaurant. I know what you’re probably thinking, “But Vince, how will battered, deep-fried seafood translate to a movie premise?” I don’t know, I’m not a movie doctor. But it can’t be worse than Battleship.