A few months ago, director McG expressed his interest in casting Will Smith in the new take on the classic story, Disney’s 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA: CAPTAIN NEMO. He thinks Will Smith is great and I couldn’t agree more. I mean, c’mon.. whenever somebody tells you that Will Smith is a great actor, you need to reply by saying, ‘Tell us something we don’t know!’
But alas, the former Prince of Bel Air turned Oscar nominee won’t get to play the lead in this project because according to Production Weekly that place now belongs to Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson.
First of all, this is no surprise, judging at how often Dwayne Johnson loves working with Disney (The Game Plan, Race To Witch Mountain) despite the fact that some of us are begging him to stop. Secondly, having him instead of Will Smith seems like an unfair trade.
Now what could be a potentially great movie has become a potentially mediocre movie.
The report also stated that the current project status is active development and the location of the filming will be in Australia.
The film is an origin story of Nemo as he creates his warship, the Nautilus. The characters come from the Jules Verne novel. A fugitive whaler teams up with a naturalist, a mysterious woman and a captain of a futuristic submarine, to search for a lost underwater civilization
that holds libraries of vast knowledge and a weapon with the power to destroy mankind. (Studio is fast-tracking the project and hopes to make the
film this year.)
