Details On David Fincher’s ‘20,000 Leagues Under The Sea’ & Why ‘Heavy Metal’ Might Not Be Coming Soon

Update: So apparently, Wallace was referring to the McG version of “20.000 Leagues Under The Sea” not Fincher’s.

With all the chatter of late surrounding David Fincher’s forthcoming adaptation of “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” and his soon-to-be-released debauchery laden take on the founding of Facebook with “The Social Network” it’s probably no surprise that most have forgotten that among the director’s choices for upcoming projects is “20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.”

Well MTV hasn’t forgotten, and they caught up with writer/director Randall Wallace who spilled some details on the upcoming project. Firstly, it looks like the deal for Scott Z. Burns (“The Bourne Ultimatum,” “The Informant!”) as previously reported was never closed as Wallace revealed he recently spent a week doing rewrites on script by the less exciting screenwriters Bill Marsilii (“Deja Vu”) and Justin Marks (“Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li”). Consider our expectations somewhat dashed.

That said, what is exciting is that the approach won’t just throw a bunch of CGI and 3D on screen and hope something sticks. “They were developing it, at least I believe this is why they asked me to work on it, they were developing it in a way that had more heart and a more realistic lucidness than what we would think of as the normal fantasy fare,” Wallace said.

“They liked the work that I was doing on the screenplay for ‘Secretariat’ and they asked me to pop over and do a few days on that. I loved that project,” he added. “I think they were developing it in a really smart way.”

Sounds promising, but again, the screenwriting team (Wallace aside) doesn’t particularly fill us with confidence and at this point, we wouldn’t be surprised that Fincher — who pretty much works with strictly A-list scribe talent — ends up just producing.

As for “Heavy Metal,” the potential omnibus animation project that earlier this year had the likes of Zack Snyder and James Cameron attached to direct segments, it seems to be somewhat stalled. In an interview with MTV, the director revealed that studios have a bit of cold feet right now on mature, fantastical animated movie. “We’re trying to get people to embrace an R-rated anthology in 3-D,” Fincher said adding jokingly, “You would think [there would be no problems from studios] with all of the examples we can show of how it works!”

As for the aforementioned directors it looks like it might be back to square one with Fincher not naming any names, but saying, “If we build it, they will come. That’s the idea. That’s the hope.”