Movies With Butter

The success of the two Sherlock Holmes movies seems to have elevated Guy Ritchie into in big leagues at Warner Bros. Deadline reports that the studio has set Ritchie to direct a new feature adaptation based on Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. He will produce the movie along with Lionel Wigram and Kevin McCormick. The script is to be written by Alex Harakis.

Stevenson's pirate adventure has spawned countless movie and TV adaptations. The last major movie to mine Stevenson's novel was Disney's 2002 animated feature Treasure Planet where the action is shifted to a futuristic setting and the pirates are robots. It bombed at the box office, making $109 million worldwide on a budget of $140 million.

Presumably, Warner's Treasure Island adaptation will be more planet-bound and won't have anything to do with artificial lifeforms. I wouldn't be surprised if the studio told Ritchie to do to this movie what he did for Sherlock Holmes, so expect kinetic camera movements and, why not?, kung fu to go along will all the swashbuckling. I'd bet there were talks of sequels in those discussions between Warner and Ritchie as well.

As previously mentioned, the two Sherlock Holmes movies were Ritchie's most successful movies, both breaking the $500 million mark at the worldwide box office. The movies star Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law as Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, respectively.

Ritchie is attached to direct The Man From U.N.C.L.E., another Warner Bros project. Steven Soderbergh was originally attached to direct, but he left for The Bitter Pill when Warner had issues with the movie's budget. Scott Z. Burns penned U.N.C.L.E.'s script.

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