Kenneth Branagh sends a kid to war against fairies in the first Artemis Fowl trailer
Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl books aren’t the most famous entries in the YA canon, but they are based around a clever conceit: The eponymous Artemis Fowl is essentially a pre-teen Lex Luthor, utilizing his family’s vast fortune to wage war on magical creatures he hates/fears. The premise of the first book is that Artemis and his bodyguard kidnap a fairy cop so they can get some of her fairy gold as a ransom, which ends up getting them involved in the drama of the fairy world and gradually softening Artemis up until he becomes more of a good guy (or at least less of a bad guy). Today, Disney released the first teaser for director Kenneth Branagh’s Artemis Fowl movie, and it definitely looks like it’s checking the important Artemis Fowl boxes.
According to /Film, though, Branagh’s movie will be making an important change thanks to the fact that it’s coming from Disney. Artemis Fowl himself will no longer be a straight-up villain who becomes a good guy, but more of an average guy who becomes a proper hero. Branagh explained that Artemis in the book thought being a villain was “sort of a cool thing,” but that’s an attitude that he said is hard to “depict responsibly” in a Disney movie.
We’ll see how that works out on August 9, 2019.