Psyche!

Sarah Michelle Gellar is probably not going to be in Tim Burton’s 2010 adaptation of Alice In Wonderland, his project slated after a full-length re-make of his name-making short FrankenWeenie (look at all the hyphens!).

The confusion amongst the staff started with this brief excerpt from the Daily Telegraph in the UK. Most of the story is about Sweeney Todd, but the capping paragraph is:

If Depp has his way, he will soon be spending even more time with her husband. The 44-year-old actor says he would make a superb lead in Burton’s forthcoming new version of Alice in Wonderland. “I’d like to have a go at it, if Tim lets me,” he told me. “I could be the first male Alice. It would certainly give it a surreal edge.”

Johnny Depp is charming enough that whatever reporter put in charge of scraping the bottom of the Johnny Depp interview barrel (Jack Sparrow was based on Keith Richards and Loony Tunes? No way!) obviously didn’t put in the wink-wink/nudge-nudge on that last quote.

No way Tim Burton chooses a male Alice, not with Tim’s issues around childhood innocence and the perversion of it.

That was our thought process running into this one-off quote over on I’m Not Obsessed. It’s from former Buffy actress Sarah Michelle Gellar:

“It’s a passion project of mine. It’s a story that I’d love to see. I’m fearful at this rate that I’m going to be the Queen of Hearts because I’m going to be too old to be Alice. It’s something I’d really like to see done. And unfortunately, it was the victim of regime change in the studio. (But) contrary to what you may have read, it’s still my project. So to all those Alice fans, I’m not giving up. Because I believe there is such a beautiful, crazy, cool, twisted story to be told there, and if I have to get down and write it myself one of these days, I may have to…!”

Now here’s the problem: with just that quote, we were thinking that somehow the American McGee project just titled Alice had somehow been merged with Alice In Wonderland.

It would make total sense, especially since Burton would be great helming the Alice project.

Aside: the plot of Alice takes place after the titular character has left Wonderland for the first time. She tries to explain her experience in the fantasy world, but ends up being committed. Alice goes mildly crazy, but has to return to Wonderland once again. Keeping with the trope that Wonderland is as much inside Alice as anything else, the new and “crazy” Wonderland has become much darker…

However, IMDB listings confirm that these are two separate projects, listing Gellar’s Alice as the front-runner, supposedly bowing this year…

Well, once the strike ends.