It looks like Ava DuVernay will get to tackle the dimension-bending ways of a tesseract after all as Deadline reports that the Selma director, who was once in the running to helm Marvel’s Black Panther movie, has just signed on to direct Disney’s film adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time. Frozen co-director and scribe Jennifer Lee is writing the adaptation of the science fantasy novel, which was the first and most popular book in L’Engle’s Time Quintet series.
A Wrinkle In Time is (the beginning of) the story of Meg Murry, a 13-year-old girl who doesn’t feel any more comfortable at home with her beautiful scientist mother and her genius little brother, Charles Wallace, than she does at school, where the principal just seems to have it out for her. But she sets her awkwardness (and resentment) aside long enough to rescue her father, who was imprisoned by extraterrestrials while tinkering with said tesseract. The siblings travel across the universe with the help of three strange women in a tale that’s wholesome in spite of all the child abandonment.
This will technically be Disney’s second crack at bringing the book to two-dimensional (for now) life: Back in 2003, the studio released a TV movie adaptation starring Alfre Woodard as Mrs. Whatsit, The Ring’s David Dorfman as the boy genius, and The 100’s Katie Stuart as the plucky Meg. No casting announcements for this latest adaptation have been made yet.