Even though the original versions of Grimms’ fairy tales are significantly more grotesque than their Disney counterparts—at the end of the original Snow White, for example, the queen is forced to dance in a pair of red-hot iron shoes until she drops dead—there’s one thing that they’re missing, and that’s kickass explosions.
Luckily, Hollywood, ever vigilant in its efforts to make classics of Western literature relevant, is now working to correct this issue. Miramax has hired Ehren Kruger, the screenwriter behind Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen, Transformers: Dark Of The Moon, and Transformers: Age Of Extinction, to adapt the Grimms’ fairy tales for television.
To be fair, Kruger also wrote The Brothers Grimm, the 2005 Terry Gilliam movie upon which the as-yet-untitled-but-probably-also-called-The-Brothers-Grimm series will be based. That movie reimagined Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, who in real life were boring old linguists and academics, as con artists who discover that fairy tales are real after encountering a 500-year-old witch in the forests of Germany.
The series looks like it will follow a similar pattern; Deadline describes it as “the swashbuckling adventures of brothers Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, who discover startling mythology and supernatural stakes behind the folklore sweeping 19th-century Europe.” The 19th-century setting, of course, is necessary to distinguish Miramax’s series from those other fairy-tale shows already on TV.