Who Will Direct The Oz Musical ‘Wicked’? Rob Marshall, Ryan Murphy, JJ Abrams & James Mangold Are Early Contenders

We had long hoped this day wouldn’t come, but here we are – Universal is finally getting the pieces together on a movie version of “Wicked,” the intolerable hit Broadway musical your faux-edgy little sister just looooooves. Producer Marc Platt, the musical’s book writer Winnie Holzman and songwriter Stephen Schwartz have begun meeting with and/or seeing early interest from a list of potential directors which currently includes James Mangold, Rob Marshall, JJ Abrams and Ryan Murphy.

“Wicked,” for those of you lucky enough to avoid this particular piece of pop art claptrap, is a musical spinoff from “The Wizard Of Oz,” based on the novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire, that re-imagines the story of the Wicked Witch as a twee high school narrative where she’s wrongly demonized by the popular girl, Glinda the Good Witch. The musical, a big-time Broadway grosser, is considered responsible for helping Idina Menzel and Kristen Chenoweth break into the mainstream. Thanks for that, guys.

This project wouldn’t work for ANY of these filmmakers, as it’s an excruciating borderline-fan-fictiony waste of time, so if we had to choose, we’d pick Harold Pleasedon’tmakethismovie or Betty Burnthescriptwithtribalfire. But we’re not making the decisions over at Universal. The contenders please!

James Mangold: Somebody needs a hit. Mangold, a genre hop-scotcher, just got burned hitching his wagon to Tom Cruise, with “Knight And Day” falling short of even “modest word-of-mouth” hit status with a massive budget in a down summer. He’s worked in horror (“Identity”), westerns (“3:10 To Yuma”), crime films (“Copland”) and, most importantly, quasi-musicals (“Walk The Line”) so he would be a reliable hire for this sort of work. Mangold would never be an offensive choice for this type of film, but he certainly wouldn’t be lighting asses on fire.

Rob Marshall: Apparently the go-to guy for people who like musicals without actually seeing them. As a film director, Marshall is barely one-for-three: “Chicago” won a questionable Best Picture Oscar, but “Memoirs of a Geisha” and “Nine” were disaster-sized disasters that lost everyone involved a whole lot of money and credibility. Someone up there still likes the hoof-lover, since he’s doing duty at sea for the next “Pirates of the Caribbean,” but this guy proved with “Nine” that he’s depressingly stage-bound and bereft of the visual imagination that allows a great movie musical to soar. He’s coasting pretty much on reputation by now, as Hollywood doesn’t seem to mind someone directing a bad movie in a specific genre as long as they keep making films in said genre.

JJ Abrams: Yeah, guys, this isn’t going to happen. “Wicked”‘s cream-of-the-crop fanbase are nerd girls (who this year’s “Twilight” and “Alice In Wonderland” seem to have solidly proven are a legit fanbase), and while Abrams certainly has his share of followers from that area, he is right now moving closer to A-List directorial status. After completing “Super 8” he’s moving on to pre-production on “Star Trek 2” and we don’t seem him shifting from that, as it is itself a highly anticipated sequel to something fairly nerd-baity. Out of all the nerd avatar filmmakers, Abrams seems the most determined to be a mini-Spielberg, and “Wicked” is not Spielbergian at all.

Ryan Murphy: Finally, the perfect, awful choice. Murphy, known for creating the hit shows “Nip/Tuck” and “Glee” (the popularity of which no doubt gave this project a kick in the ass), is a nightmare behind the camera if his directorial debut, “Running With Scissors” is anything to go by. With “Eat Pray Love” on the way, Murphy’s got an empty dance card and seems perfectly suited to the show’s mix of treacly artificial melodrama, atonal music and juvenile misbehavior. Oh yeah, he does have Mark Ruffalo attached to a gestating HIV/AIDS drama “The Normal Heart,” but like we just said, it’s an HIV/AIDS drama; funding on that will be hard to come by so don’t be surprised if it goes straight to the backburner.

If these names are anything to go by, particularly Murphy’s, we’ll guess execs don’t mind if this movie looks like shitty, shitty TV*. And why would Hollywood stop at one bad idea when they can Xerox it? “Wicked” is not nearly the only “Oz” project still in development. There’s “Oz The Great And Powerful” over at Disney, while Drew Barrymore is tentatively attached to the Zach Helm-penned “Surrender Dorothy.” Furthermore, the Polish brothers have been working on their own top secret “Oz” project, while IMDb has the details on a goofy 3D reworking of the story with luminaries like Sean Astin, Lance Henriksen and Christopher Lloyd involved.

The project is still in its early days, with more meetings still to take place in the fall when the authors of the musical come to Hollywood. It sounds like a lot of people will need to sign off on the director so don’t be surprised if a decision takes a while to get made and none of these names end up doing it.

*Another Universal musical based on a hit Broadway show that looked like shitty TV: the $609 million-grossing “Mamma Mia.”