Jennifer Lee is on fire lately! After co-writing Disney hits Wreck-It Ralph and Frozen, she’s set her sights on a new project for the Mouse House. Only this time it’s live-action, and an adaptation of a beloved childhood novel—Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time.
Lee takes over the project from Jeff Stockwell, who had first tackled the screenplay when the adaptation was first announced in 2010. It made sense, as he had adapted Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia. However, according to Variety, Lee wowed executives with her emphasis on strong female characters and her ideas for building L’Engle’s twisty, terrifying sci-fi world filled with tesseracts and time travel. No surprise, those are the two elements that made Frozen and Ralph so compelling to movie audiences.
We’re especially interested to see Lee’s take on protagonist Meg Murry, intellectually wise beyond her 14 years but still rather emotionally immature; Frozen’s Anna likely owes a lot of her spirit to Meg. The same goes for Meg’s child prodigy younger brother Charles Wallace, who falls under the sway of an evil alien. It’s darker stuff than the other two movies have handled, but we think the characters are in good hands. Especially because the central tenet of Wrinkle is love.
