Deadline is reporting that Ava DuVernay — director of the acclaimed film Selma — will direct Disney’s upcoming adaptation of the classic fantasy novel A Wrinkle in Time. The script for the film has been penned by Frozen writer and co-director Jennifer Lee.
DuVernay is currently attached to two other projects as well and it is unclear which film she’ll tackle first. From Deadline:
Deadline revealed February 8 that DuVernay had been offered this film and was also in the mix at DreamWorks for Intelligent Life, a sci-fi thriller scripted by Colin Trevorrow and his Jurassic World collaborator Derek Connolly. DuVernay now has the offer on that film and is in negotiations on a pic that has 12 Years A Slave Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o attached to a fable about a UN worker in a department designed to represent mankind if there was ever contact with aliens, who falls for a mystery woman who turns out to be one. That film is produced by Frank Marshall, Trevorrow and Big Beach principals Peter Saraf and Marc Turtletaub.
As for the source material, the 1963 novel has been a favorite since its publication and won the Newbery Medal from the Association for Library Service to Children.
A Wrinkle In Time involves a young girl whose government scientist father has gone missing after working on a mysterious project called a tesseract, which involves being transported to a fifth dimension with mysterious inhabited planets. She takes part in a search for her father and sees some incredible creatures along the way.