"Frozen" director and co-writer Jennifer Lee will tackle the adaptation of Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wrinkle In Time" for Disney, one of her favorite novels as a child, Variety reports.
Disney originally announced the project in 2010 with Jeff Stockwell, who wrote the screenplay adaptation of "Bridge To Terabithia," attached as the screenwriter. Lee's idea for the script "emphasizes a strong female-driven narrative and creatively approaches the science fiction and world-building elements of the book," according to Variety.
"A Wrinkle In Time" is the first book in L'Engle's "Time Quartet" series published between 1962 and 1986 (An Acceptable Time, published in 1989 is also included in this series). The young adult novel follows a young girl whose government scientist father disappears after working on a project known as the tesseract - no Avengers in this story though.
The New Yorker suggested in 2010 that an adaptation of the book has been stalled due to the fantasy fiction's frequent appearance on banned book lists. These lists come largely from religious groups, which chide the novel's offensive language. Jerry Falwell's ministries argued "it undermines religious beliefs and challenges their idea of God," according to Banned Books Awareness.
Twenty-six publishers rejected L'Engle's manuscript before Farrar, Straus and Giroux finally published it. The book went on to win the Newbury Medal in 1963.
The announcement comes on the heels of the latest classic young adult novel to receive the big screen treatment, "The Giver" coming out on Aug. 15. Jeff Bridges spent nearly twenty years trying to adapt Lois Lowry's book, according to Entertainment Weekly. He originally developed the project for his father Lloyd Bridges to play the role of The Giver, the character Jeff eventually took on for the movie.
Disney has not hired a director for "A Wrinkle In Time," but Jim Whitaker will produce with Catherine Hand, who worked on a TV production of the novel in 2003 for ABC.
