As Henry Selick prepares to debut his well-reviewed film Wendell & Wild, the filmmaker is looking back on why his earlier project The Shadow King was never completed by Disney/Pixar. “I got the rights back,” Selick reveals in the latest episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Behind the Screen podcast, where he says the film could find new life someday. “I’ll owe Disney a little bit of money if we set it up, but maybe [it will get made]. I absolutely feel that it would be successful and for the right price, if [a potential partner] likes what I’ve written and wants that movie, rather than think they like it and then want to turn it into Toy Story 8.”
The director of The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach, Selick says The Shadow King began life when he ran into then-Pixar creative John Lasseter at Skywalker Sound while completing 2009’s Coraline, for which Selick was Oscar-nominated. “He really loved the movie, loved what he was seeing, and then they screened Coraline at Pixar and everyone liked it. And they offered me a deal to make a stop-motion film. And it had to be for a much lower budget than the CG films,” says Selick. “Stop-motion films have never out of the gate been as successful as big CG films. The best stop-motion films live forever, though. And, as we see with Nightmare, make billions in merchandising.”
They made a deal that Selick would make a film, and he pitched a few, including Shadow King. Then, according to Selick, the project was put through the Pixar system. “It’s just how all their greatest successes [have been made]. [They] have their brain trust, and they rip things apart, they rebuild, rip things apart, rebuild,” says Selick. “He really couldn’t support my vision. He thought he could make it better. And so we kept changing and changing and changing.”
Then Alan Horn came to Disney as film boss and the movie was shut down. “Basically, John Lasseter couldn’t help himself. He tried to Disney-fy it until the budget went through the roof. It got shut down, and I was kind of down, I wasn’t sure I was going to make another movie again. But then the Key & Peele show started on Comedy Central, and it was Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele who kind of inspired me to do another film. I loved what they did so much.”
Source:
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movie ... 235239243/
Following the release of Wendell & Wild, Selick sat down with Double Toasted, via YouTube, and spoke about his career. Among the things mentioned is the fact that Selick has reacquired the rights to The Shadow King back from Disney and is therefore free to do whatever he wants with it.
"Guess what? I got the rights back from Disney and maybe if... [Wendell & Wild] is considered a success, maybe I'll revive The Shadow King... It'd be different, it'd be like my original story, which they claimed they loved, but then changed everything in it... in my mind it was sort of like a darker in tone Dumbo. You know, Dumbo is made fun of for his big ears and turns out, 'my god, that elephant can fly', well this was a kid with deformed hands and maybe they're not as cute as big ears and that was their problem, but that's a really messed up thing. He's going to get taught by a living shadow girl how to use those hands to not only make the greatest hand shadows in the world, but hand shadows that can come to life. I thought that was a good story and still think it is."
Source:
https://screenrant.com/henry-selick-sha ... ts-future/
Selick also hopes to revive his shuttered project “The Shadow King,” revealing plans to initially release his original vision as a graphic novel in order to spur interest and act as a proof-of-concept for an eventual film Selick might offer to another director. This possible resurrection of “The Shadow King” under another filmmaker’s lens made an Annecy conversation between Selick and Laika’s Brian McLean all the more eventful, as Selick seized the opportunity to screen five minutes of nearly finished footage he completed when producing the ill-fated project at Pixar in 2011.
The first of two sequences featured a bald headed, white suited doppelganger for the Marvel villain Kingpin answer an urgent call while the shadow he casts takes on a malevolent life of its own, while the second sequence updated a clip circulating online with startling technical polish. Both ably imparted the director’s trademark sinister humor, lending the excerpt an additional bittersweet tinge.
Source:
https://variety.com/2024/film/global/he ... 236033866/
It's one thing for a project to be shelved during the development phase and quite another for it to be killed while it is actually shooting! I recall Selick saying that he intended to shop around to see if another studio was willing to take on the film (i.e. fund it, I assume.) I imagine nothing came of that or we would have heard something.
