Johnny Depp must like his children's authors, as he played J M Barrie a few years ago in Finding Neverland and now THR reports that he's signed up to bring the tale of Dr. Seuss, aka Theodor Geisel, to the big screen.
The companies behind Despicable Me and the upcoming Dr. Seuss' The Lorax, Universal and Illumination Entertainment, are behind the film, but despite the CGI background, this movie will be live action. The real question though is whether Geisel's life story has enough of interest to sustain a film.
He was born in 1904 and spent much of his childhood in Springfield, Massachusetts before going to college at Dartmouth. Throughout his early years, he drew advertising and comic strips, then political cartoons during World War II. By 1950, Geisel was publishing the books that became worldwide classics. He died of throat cancer in 1991. On the surface it's not that thrilling a tale, but hopefully Universal and Illumination will find a way to make it work.
And while we're talking Johnny Depp, he's just brought screenwriter Billy Ray (Shattered Glass, Flightplan) to take over writing duties on his planned adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man. David Koepp was recently said to be writing the script, but apparently he and director Rob Marshall disagreed about the direction and so Ray has been brought in instead.