One of the weirder projects David Fincher had embarked on was an adaptation of “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” for Disney. As you might expect, things didn’t go as planned, and the project was quickly canned by the mouse house. Fincher is now explaining why.
Speaking to Letterboxd, Fincher talks about “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.” According to the filmmaker, he had some great ideas for the film, but it was his talks with Disney that quickly made him realize they weren’t on the same page.
“Look, I really wanted to do ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea’ because what we had in mind was really kind of gross and cool and wet and steampunk and all that,” said Fincher. “You can’t make people be excited about the risks that you’re excited about. Disney was in a place where they were saying, ‘We need to know that there’s a thing that we know how to exploit snout to tail, and you’re going to have to check these boxes for us.’”
He continued, “And I was like, ‘You’ve read Jules Verne, right?’ [Laughs] This is a story about an Indian prince who has real issues with white imperialism, and that’s what we want to do. And they were like, ‘Yeah, yeah, fine. As long as there’s a lot less of that in it.’ So you get to a point where you go, ‘Look, I can’t fudge this, and I don’t want you to discover at the premiere what it is that you’ve financed. It doesn’t make any sense because it’s just going to be pulling teeth for the next two years.’ And I don’t want to do that. I mean, life’s too short.”
Gosh, imagine the potential? Just purely based on Fincher describing it as “gross, cool, wet, and steampunk,” that’s more than enough for us to wonder what could have been. Sadly, it’s not something we’ll ever get to see.
There have been no efforts to revive the project, at least as of this moment. Soon after the film got canned, Fincher signed his big contract with Netflix and he’s been making movies and TV shows with the streaming giant ever since.
Let us remember, Fincher has taken on numerous different projects over the years that ended up never getting made. He’s known to bail on things at the flick of a switch, mostly due to his high budget demands. Whatever happened to “Strangers on A Train”? “World War Z 2”? “Jobs”? “The Girl Who Played With Fire”?