Turns out there's life yet in Henry Selick's The Shadow King, which Disney unceremoniously dumped last year for a number of reasons. One was the $50M+ budget, while others said it was a lack of real forward progress. Whatever the case, fans of Selick's The Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline didn't have much reason for optimism. Disney even punted him off an adaptation of Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book.
But it looks like things are trending upwards again, as K5 International have stepped in to produce the ambitious project alongside Josh Penn (Beasts of the Southern Wild). It's a project that was probably too dark for Disney, anyway, as indicated by the newly released plot blurb....
The Shadow King is a deliciously magical tale about nine-year-old New York orphan Hap who hides his fantastically weird hands with long fingers from a cruel world. But when a living shadow girl teaches him to make amazing hand shadows that come to life, his hands become incredible weapons in a shadow war against a ravenous monster bent on killing Hap’s brother Richard and ultimately destroying New York.
Kind of sounds like Edward Scissorhands meets Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, which is a combination that could be awesome. Selick is writing the script and will direct, with a good portion of the production already completed. So hopefully that means we won't have to wait too long for it. To be honest, it's amazing to me that there's been this much trouble finding a stable home for it. Selick's proven to be a guy who makes long-standing classics, and who wouldn't want to get in on the ground floor of the next one?
