Tim Burton Might Direct Live-Action Sleeping Beauty

While Disney gears up to release Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland this March, it seems that they're now setting their sights on getting Burton to lend his unique touch to another live-action version of one of their cartoon classics - Sleeping Beauty.

While the upcoming Alice movie is said to be a sequel to the original two books, the potential new Sleeping Beauty is rumored to be taking a different tactic by instead focusing on the story's villain, the evil witch Maleficent, who would in fact would be the title character of this version.

If this sounds somewhat familiar, it should. A similar approach was taken in Gregory Maguire's novel Wicked, which took a sympathetic look at the villainous Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. Wicked, as it turns out, was turned into a hugely successful Broadway musical that one can still see advertised all over New York City.

Given the success of Wicked and the presumed upcoming success of Alice in Wonderland, it's not hard to see why Disney is taking this approach. It definitely has a lot of potential; Sleeping Beauty is a relatively straightforward kind of fairy tale that could use a new twist and Burton's talents and artistic vision would fit in perfectly with a character like Maleficent, especially if she were shown in a similarly sympathetic-but still evil-light as some of the previous characters he's tackled, like Sweeney Todd. The project would actually seem more fitting for Burton than Alice, which could easily go either way at this point depending on whether Burton exercises his talents or whether he gives in to making the movie into a now-cliché "Burtonized" version of the original tale.

Burton has shown great artistic ability beyond his usual gothic architecture and stark, pale faces though, with movies like Big Fish and Ed Wood. One can only hope that he reaches outside his comfort zone for both of these projects.

It's not clear yet just how soon Burton would be tackling this project, as he was assumed to be starting production on a Dark Shadows adaptation as soon as Alice wraps up. If Maleficent does get off the ground, it raises the question to Disney fans of whether or not Disney is going to start doing live-action versions of all of their classic movies. Tim Burton fans, though, have another question to argue about, in regards to the potential Maleficent movie - what parts will Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter play?