Only joking. It's a gothic horror romp featuring Johnny Depp.

He scratched his bristly chin, wondering - not for the first time this year - if the moment had finally come to deepen and mature as a filmmaker. Sitting on his desk were a pile of scripts that he had solicited via proxies, to keep the Hollywood rumour mill at bay that...perhaps it was time for Tim Burton to grow up.

He leafed through the pages of a biopic about Marie Curie; a tale of three woman graduates from an Ivy League university re-living the highs and lows of their lives at an impromptu reunion; a medical flick about the development of AZT, and the extraordinary efforts of scientists to combat the most dangerous disease in 100 years; a study of Freud's early days in Vienna..

Something he could be proud of, something with integrity.

He sat like a Buddhist monk for several hours, contemplating the fork in the road ahead of him...

...before throwing the scripts in his waste-bin (shaped liked the demon Pazuzu with a huge maw of a fanged mouth open), and said: "Fuck it, I'll make a vampire flick with Johnny Depp instead".

Dark Shadows will be Tim Burton's new project, re-uniting the prince of darkness with long-time collaborator Johnny Depp, who was apparently a big fan of the 1960s vampiric TV soap as a kid. The film is set to begin shooting in April, with Richard Zanuck, Graham King and Christi Dembrowski on producing duties. The current script is by Seth Grahame-Smith, with unspecified collaboration from John August.

Depp's commitment to Dark Shadows leaves Universal’s Snow White and the Huntsman and Kathryn Bigelow’s Triple Frontier looking for some other leading man, after hints that Depp was heading their way.

HR

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