Sam Raimi's "Oz: The Great and Powerful," is officially a non-canonical prequel to Baum's original "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz;" but from the brand-new full trailer it's very apparent that they want audiences to take it as a prequel to the classic MGM film: Here's Oz as you (and your parents, and their parents...) grew up with it - right down to the black-and-white 'real world' - but now even bigger and realized with state-of-the-art FX and 3D cinematography.
Given that, the powerful place the MGM "Oz" has in the cultural memories of millions worldwide and the fact that the film is looking pretty handsome; it's probably appropriate that the trailer includes a scene of the main character tumbling into a mountain of gold coins to shame Scrooge McDuck:
Ho. Ly. SHIT is that final shot money - the sound of five generations worth of movie audiences reacting the way Marvel fans do whenever Guy-No-One-Else-In-The-Audience-Has-Heard-Of turns up after the credits. There's a lot of Margaret Hamilton's Witch in the way Raimi tends to depict monsters and/or evil in general, and you can tell that they know full well that that's the character to be teasing here; even as the rest of the trailer is going "YELLOW BRICK ROAD! EMERALD CITY! FLYING MONKEYS! MUNCHKINS!"
The whole point of this project, initially, was to beat "Wicked" to theaters before that production stalled. MY question now is, if this is even close to good... do they still bother with "Wicked?" I know the play is a huge deal, but don't movie audiences look at the trailer for that and go "Didn't we already see that?"
As expected, both Ted Raimi and Bruce Campbell are scheduled to appear. Film opens in March.
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