Bert & Bertie are strapping in for the wildest ride in the wilderness. The directing duo, who last helmed the dramedy movie Troop Zero and episodes of the Marvel Studios series Hawkeye, are in talks to direct a new feature film inspired by Disney’s Big Thunder Mountain Railroad theme park attraction. The Margot Robbie co-founded LuckyChap Entertainment, behind Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey and the upcoming Barbie, is producing with Tony and Ridley Scott’s Scott Free Productions, which recently backed The Last Duel and Death on the Nile for Disney’s 20th Century Studios. Deadline first reported the news.
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According to the report, Bert & Bertie were in Disney’s good graces for their well-received episodes of Hawkeye, which launched the upcoming Marvel spinoff series Echo on Disney+. The duo delivered a presentation that made the studio “excited about their vision of what this film could be.”
Along with Troop Zero and the Jeremy Renner and Hailee Steinfeld-starring Hawkeye, Bert & Bertie’s credits include the YouTube Red original movie Dance Camp and episodes of Hulu’s The Great and HBO Max’s Our Flag Means Death.
Big Thunder is the latest Disney Parks ride to get the big-screen treatment. 2003’s Pirates of the Caribbean, which spawned a five-movie franchise with Johnny Depp starring as Captain Jack Sparrow, was Disney’s biggest success mining its theme park attractions for film adaptations; that blockbuster followed the 1997 television movie Tower of Terror, 2000’s Mission to Mars, and 2002’s The Country Bears.
Plans for a Big Thunder adaptation date back to 2013. Disney’s ABC Studios gave a pilot order to a drama series based on the iconic mine cart roller coaster that first opened in Disneyland’s Frontierland in 1979 before inspiring similar rides at Florida’s Magic Kingdom, Tokyo Disneyland, and Disneyland Park Paris.
That version of Big Thunder was written by Jason Fuchs (Pan, Wonder Woman) and was to be directed by Rob Bowman (Elektra, The X-Files). According to a 2013 report, ABC’s Big Thunder was “set in a mining town amid the gold rush in the American Southwest that gets hit by a natural disaster. The TV project centers on a brilliant, late 19th-century New York doctor. He and his family are given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to relocate to a frontier mining town run by a powerful, but mysterious tycoon — but quickly realize that not everything in Big Thunder is as it seems.”
Disney’s more recent ride-inspired movies include Jungle Cruise, which set sail with Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt starring, and the rebooted Haunted Mansion, coming 20 years after the studio first brought the iconic Disneyland attraction to life in a 2003 comedy vehicle starring Eddie Murphy.
