The race to see which update of Snow White will be the Capote to the others’ Infamous just got a little trippier with the announcement that Tarsem Singh (The Cell, The Fall) will direct Relativity Media’s “edgy, modernized, re-imagining” of the classic fairy tale—you know, the one that Brett Ratner described over a guy beatboxing as “not your grandfather’s Snow White,” where the dwarves are “robbers,” and there’s “more comedy.” Promisingly, that was the last time anyone over at Relativity let Brett Ratner talk about Snow White, and Tarsem’s participation hopefully suggests that, while this similarly won’t be your grandfather’s Snow White, it might be the Snow White that your grandfather envisions when he’s hopped up on Demerol and in the late stages of senile dementia.
Meanwhile, Universal is still trying to beat them to the screen with Snow White And The Huntsman—a similarly “gritty” take on the tale that obviously features a much larger role for the woodsman tasked with killing Snow White, who then reneges on the deal and decides instead to train her to become an ass-kicking female heroine. Several names have been tossed around for the lead role—most recently, Tom Hardy and Johnny Depp—but no one has committed yet. Also, Disney has spent the last six years working on a project called Snow And The Seven—whose hip, text message-friendly title automatically makes us hate it—that re-imagines the dwarves as Shaolin monks trained in the deadly martial arts, to be directed by Yuen Wo Ping. (Weirdly, novelist Michael Chabon was doing the script for that one, until he was replaced by producers who wanted it to be “more fun.”) Oh, and Natalie Portman has been “attached” to all three of these films at one time or another, because of course she has. If only there were other brunette actresses in Hollywood.