Spot the Difference

It has recently been revealed that Tim Burton will soon start work on his adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, with casting beginning with Australian actress Mia Wasikowska and the possibility of Johnny Depp (right, as Willy Wonka) appearing as the Mad Hatter. Past attempts to transfer Lewis Carroll’s classic novel to film have been wildly unsatisfying (I’m thinking specifically of Disney’s animation and the 1999 TV movie) but I’m sure that Burton has the ability to bring out the true hallucinogenic quality of Wonderland. On discovering the news of this film though, my first thought had nothing to do with casting, or Burton, or even past adaptations. Instead, I instantly remembered reading about another film currently stuck in pre-production; Alice, based on the computer game where Carroll’s protagonist returns to the strange world to find it a darker place than she remembers. It looks as if the film may never get made and yet IMDb still slates it for a 2009 release. So does the world want two Alice in Wonderland films in the space of a year? How does the first to be released effect the second? Can both find an audience and financial success, or is one doomed to fail?

Let’s look at the track record. Hollywood is rarely original so the release of two similar films in quick succession is hardly a new issue, just look at Antz and A Bug’s Life. If I stopped the average person in the street, however, and asked them if they’d seen the 1991 film about Robin Hood, they would surely assume that I was enquiring about Prince of Thieves starring Kevin Costner (which I love by the way). Very few, if any, would even acknowledge the existence of the film’s rival Robin Hood, which starred Uma Thurman as Marian (below left, with Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio in Prince of Thieves right) and had a video release in the UK after being made for TV in the US. The film is no worse than the more famous version, and is at the very least more historically accurate than Costner’s offering (the Celts several centuries out of date really got me). So why did one get all the attention? Perhaps it has something to do with the actors involved; Kevin Costner, Christian Slater, Alan Rickman and Morgan Freeman were all big names in the early nineties, while Thurman was a new face on the Hollywood radar after Dangerous Liaisons. If the big names always win, however, then what about Infamous? This 2006 film followed Truman Capote’s relationship with the men who inspired In Cold Blood, practically the same story as 2005’s hugely successful Capote. Infamous, however, had a host of Hollywood stars including Sandra Bullock, Gwyneth Paltrow, Daniel Craig, Sigourney Weaver and Isabella Rossellini, surely trumping its competitor. Nor is the film considered particularly inferior to the other, while many consider Toby Jones’s performance superior to the one which won Phillip Seymour Hoffman an Oscar. In this case then, the answer to the question of why one succeeds while the other fades into obscurity is simple; Capote got there first.

If the success of a film with a direct subject rival can be hampered by an inferior all-star cast or a secondary release, then the makers of Dylan must be bracing themselves for a car crash. After this summer’s The Edge of Love, a film about Welsh poet Dylan Thomas’s relationship with his wife and ex (played by starlets Sienna Miller and Keira Knightley), comes the delayed Caitlin (starring Rosamund Pike as the eponymous wife) and then Dylan starring, um, Neil Morrissey and Matthew Kelly in supporting roles. If they submit to the trend which has destroyed the success of Robin Hood and Infamous, then the third Dylan Thomas film in one year may not be third time lucky. We can only hope that Tim Burton can break the curse.