Don Murphy Spills Carter Beans At Chud

According to Don Murphy, speaking to Chud, the John Carter books may not be headed to Disney after all. Murphy suggests that Walden Media have the trump card in the ongoing neogtiations: they'll get the movie into production with a year and a half.

Further to my Pixar comments earlier, Chud are reporting that Finding Nemo's Andrew Stanton is the man being lined up for adapting the first in the John Carter series. They state that it would be produced in live action - though some other 'please don't name me sources' have sworn to me that this is not the case and the film would be animated.

Furthermore, Chud claim that Stanton's next film is Pixar's 'post-post-Ratatouille' effort, but I think it's pretty clear that, actually, his film W.A.L-E is the next Pixar release, set for summer 2008. That would free him up to have John Carter in production by early 2009, very possibly late 2008 - if Soderbergh can line them up this way, why can't anybody else?

I'm going to keep digging - and if you are either Don Murphy or somebody else who wants to go on the record about this, then please drop me a line or leave something in the comments. I admit that I'm a lot less interested in Burrough's books than I am Andrew Stanton's films, but don't let this declared preference put you off.