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Back in November we flipped at the announcement that Cate Blanchett would be starring as the Evil Stepmother in director Mark Romanek's live-action Cinderella movie. It was a perfect casting move, plus we were dying to see what would come of a Blanchett/Romanek pairing. But now it looks like we will never know.
Romanek (director of Never Let Me Go and the fantastic Locke & Key pilot) has quit the picture after butting heads with Disney on the level of darkness in this fairy tale flick. What a shame. Deadline is reporting that, "Romanek and the studio have differing views on how to tell the story. Romanek's is darker, and it's too dark for this to turn out to be a fairy tale ending." What garbage. Cinderella is exactly the kind of fairy tale we want to see go dark, because it would be new! We've seen dark Snow White, and dark Red Riding Hood and so forth. Can you imagine a crazed Blanchett going off the rails?!
Funny enough, this is the second movie Romanek has left for these reasons; he dodged a huge bullet when he left The Wolfman after trying to make it darker than the studio would have liked. In the end, we feel this is Disney's loss.
