Spielberg’s WAR HORSE
The first full-length trailer for Steven Spielberg’s War Horse, based on the book by Michael Morpurgo (Scholastic, 2007), has just hit the interwebs.
A teaser trailer was released in June. This new, longer version has considerably more emotional impact (warning: tears my be jerked).
The book was also adapted as a play that has been a hit both here and in the U.K., where it’s been running for four years. The Guardian published a piece yesterday on why it has been so successful and whether it will be hurt by the competing film version. The writer thinks not, because theater has its own special magic. We think not because both the play and the book will gain from the publicity.
The tie-in is coming next month:
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Official Movie Site: WarHorseMovie.com
Spielberg has two family films competing for attention during the Christmas holiday. The animated, 3-D adaptation of The Adventures of Tintin opens on 12/21. War Horse follows on Christmas Day.
The director’s next two films are also based on books. This month, he begins filming Lincoln, based on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals (S&S, 2005). It stars Daniel Day Lewis in the title role and Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln.
In an interview in the current issue of the UK film magazine, Empire, Spielberg says that Teams of Rivals is,
…much too big a book to be a movie, so the Lincoln story only takes place in the last few months of his Presidency and life. I was interested in how… he passed the 13th Amendment into constitutional law. The Emancipation Proclamation was a war powers act and could have been struck down by any court after the war ended…But what permanently ended slavery was the very close vote in the House of Representatives over the 13th Amendment – that story I’m excited to tell.
Following Lincoln, he turns to quite different subject matter with Robopocalypse, based on the novel by Daniel H. Wilson (Doubleday, June, 2011), a debut thriller set in the near future, about technology uniting and turning against us. Heavily promoted at BEA this year, it landed on the NYT best seller list at #13 for one week and is still on hold in some libraries. Spielberg signed it before it was published, based on a 100-page sample. He tells Empire that it reminded him of Michael Chrichton (Spielberg’s hit Jurassic Park was based on his 1990 novel) and he hopes to begin shooting some time next year, with a release date some time in the summer of 2013.