If Hollywood is going to keep bringing William Shakespeare's classic romance Romeo and Juliet back to the big screen, then that means that they are going to have to approach it from absolutely every creative angle imaginable. In the last few years alone we've seen multiple examples of this, but now another one is coming down the pipe - and this one is apparently being made in the style of Zack Snyder's 300.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Sony Pictures is now in talks to pick up Verona, a new film inspired by the aforementioned classic tale of star-crossed lovers. The project is being based on a spec script written by Neil Widener and Gavin James, and Joe Roth (Alice in Wonderland, Maleficent) is attached to produce. Exact details of how the new approach will work are reportedly being kept tightly under wraps, but the trade report says that the movie will "reimagine the classic love story through a lens of an epic, 300-style world."
It's not entirely clear what this means, as there are different degrees to which that description can be understood. One interpretation is that it will be the story of Romeo and Juliet, but play out as a large scale action/war epic like 300. If that concept is taken a step further, however, one has to wonder if this movie is planning to mime the aesthetic of Zack Snyder's film by using all green screen sets, lending the feature a comic book aesthetic.
Either way, it sounds like we should expect a version of Romeo and Juliet quite different from what's been out recently.
As alluded to earlier, news of Verona being in development isn't shocking at all, as Hollywood has been pressing the Romeo and Juliet button quite a lot recently. For example, there is the version with mythical creatures that Joe Dante announced last year. And then there's the comedic spin Rosaline, which last we heard was going to star Felicity Jones. And let's also not forget that we are just a few years from both the zombified adaptation that was Jonathan Levine's Warm Bodies and the garden gnome-centric Gnomeo and Juliet from director Kelly Asbury.
As you probably guessed, this project is still very much in the early stages of development, but it will be interesting to see if it winds up getting fast-tracked if not just to stay in competition with the other versions of the classic Shakespeare tale that are in the works.
