In anticipation of the release of’Mank’on December 4, this week Collider will be presentingoriginal essays and featuresdiving into the work of David Fincher.
David Fincher, likeGuillermo del ToroandRidley Scott, is a filmmaker as famous for the movies that he made as for the onesthat never got off the drawing board. His entire career, in fact, is littered with tantalizing what-ifs (before shifting toMank, he was prepping a sequel toBrad Pittzombie epicWorld War Z). But there was one project, above all others, that captures the imagination like no other, and got damnably close to production before it all fell apart – Disney’s big budget, 3D version of20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
Disney’s ties to20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,Jules Verne’s classic adventure tale (originally serialized between March 1869 and June 1870), date back to 1954, when it releasedRichard Fleischer’s live-action adaptation. That film, which memorably starredKirk DouglasandJames Mason(as Captain Nemo), was proof that Disney could make movies that are just as imaginative and thrilling in live-action as he could in animation. (The movie’s special effect centerpiece was a giant mechanized squid, truly cutting edge for the time.) While the movie was a smash at the box office (it was the third highest grossing movie of the year), it was truly immortalized in the Disney parks. The year after the movie opened, there was a walkthrough attraction in Disneyland’s anemic Tomorrowland area featuring props and costumes from the movie, and in 1959 the Submarine Voyage offered in the same land, tangentially connected to the movie. It was more explicitly tied to Walt Disney World’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: Submarine Voyage, which opened on June 24, 2025. (There are also themed areas in the Paris and Tokyo parks.) And20,000 Leagues Under the Sealived, for decades, in the imagination of those who visited these parks. Even if you weren’t familiar with the movie, you knew about the Nautilus submarine, the fearsome exploits of Captain Nemo, and the horrors that lurked in the depths of the ocean.
In January 2009, Variety reported that Disney was looking to mount a remake of20,000 Leagues Under the SeawithCharlie’s AngelsdirectorMcQ. By February,Will Smithhad become attached to play Captain Nemo and screenwriterJustin Markswas brought on to work on the script byDéjà vu’sBill Marsilii, which was described as being “fast tracked.” (Smith would eventually star as the genie in last year’sAladdinand Marks would pen Disney’s live-actionJungle Bookremake.)BraveheartscreenwriterRandall Wallacewould subsequently work on the script, which had a tentative 2010 production start date. But by November 2009, McQ had left the project due to “creative differences.” Variety cheekily said that Disney had “beached” the project.
But the project didn’t stay submerged for long. By May 2010, it had been announced that Fincher would be tackling the project withScott Z. Burns, screenwriter ofSteven Soderbergh’sThe InformantandContagionhandling scripting duties. At the end of 2010 he told Collider (hey, that’s us!) that the movie would be in 3D, admitting that the extra dimension is “cool … when it’s done right.” The following year Fincher offhandedly remarked that the film would be “70% CG” and in November it was announced thatAndrew Kevin Walker, who had writtenSevenand done uncredited work on several subsequent Fincher projects, would beoverhauling Burns’ script. At the end of 2011, he explained to MTV what he liked about the project specifically: “I was alive when a man stepped on the moon. It was awe-inspiring, the notion of that much care that NASA took. I’m sure it was the same thing for the Manhattan Project. The idea of a post-Civil War version of science fiction and the notion of being able to breathe underwater was so radical in its thinking. That’s pretty cool. If you’re going to do big tentpole teenage PG-13 summer movies, it’s kind of cool that it would be this.”Yes please.
In 2012, in anunusually detailed post, Variety said that Disney had put Fincher on a three-month hold as they figure out what, exactly, to do with the project. This was in an attempt to rein in the project, on the heels of the costly debacle ofJohn Carter(which was roughly set in the same time period and featuring a similar, steam punk-y aesthetic) and considering they were still dealing with the ongoing headache ofThe Lone Ranger, due out the following summer. In the same post, it was noted that Fincher was going after frequent collaboratorBrad Pittto play Ned Land (the role Kirk Douglas played in the original). In November 2012, while promotingKilling Them Softly, Pitt told MTV that he would be down for boarding the Nautilus for Fincher. “I’d love to I mean, he’s my man. He’s got a great take on it. That’s just gonna be about schedule and time allocation, but he’s my man,” Pitt told the outlet.
But by February 2013, Fincher was meeting with the Australian federal arts ministerSimon Crean, as the country was offering a healthy tax incentive to get the production to shoot down under. (The Hollywood Reporterpegs the number at $19 million.) They were looking at places like the Village Roadshow Studios and the Fox Studios in Sydney and the production was going to generate more than 2,000 jobs for Australian locals. But at this point the notoriously finnicky Pitt had officially passed, continuing a pattern that he had established when agreeing to doDarren Aronofsky’sThe Fountainand ejecting at the last minute (after sets had been constructed). He instead chose to star inDavid Ayer’sFury.
That same month I askedBurns about the project. Burns, who was promoting his new Soderbergh collaborationSide Effects, seemed optimistic that the project was creeping towards production (“I think they’re getting closer to pulling the trigger”). ““I think both of our goal was to make Captain Nemo, as he is in the book, a very complicated character, because there’s some things that he say says and explores that are really profound and amazing but there is some behavior that he engages in that is horrific and criminal,” Burns told me. “And there’s a really interesting triangle, between him and Ned Land and the Professor, of three things that continue to march through time since the Industrial Revolution, and that’s technology and commerce and humanity. And these three things tugging at each other inside a submarine is what I wanted to get at.” Burns confirmed that Walker had also worked on the script and that the movie would be shot in native 3D.
By April of 2013, Australia had upped the number they were going to give the production to $22.5 million,described as“the largest inducement it’s ever offered to a Hollywood production.” Still, in the same report, the project was described as not fully green lit by Disney as the film is “is still contingent on casting.” Sadly, by July 2013, Fincher had officially become attached to adaptGillian Flynn’sGone Girl, The Playlist exclusively revealed that his20,0000 Leagueswas dead and that Fincher had been off the project for months. Apparently, it came to the cast Fincher was putting together for20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. After Pitt pulled out, Fincher went toDaniel Craig(who had just starred in the filmmaker’sThe Girl with the Dragon Tattooand was set to appear in the sequels) andMatt Damon(who had previously been attached to Fincher’s adaptation ofBrian Michael Bendis’ graphic novelTorso) but both balked at the technically complicated, 140-day shoot in Australia. (The report notes that Damon’s father was dealing with cancer at the time and he didn’t want to be that far away from home.) Fincher then floated the idea ofChanning Tatum, but Disney balked, instead suggestingChris Hemsworth. That’s when Fincher decided to leave, quietly moving Andrew Kevin Walker over to overhaulSteve Zaillian’sThe Girl Who Played with Fire, the nextDragon Tatoomovie. That project also never happened.
In 2014 Fincher described the project to Playboy, calling it “fucking cool.” “It was smart and crazy entertaining, with the Nautilus crew fighting every kind of gigantic Ray Harryhausen thing. But it also had this riptide to it. We were doing Osama bin Nemo, a Middle Eastern prince from a wealthy family who has decided that white imperialism is evil and should be resisted,” Fincher told the magazine. “The notion was to put kids in a place where they’d say, ‘I agree with everything he espouses. I take issue with his means—or his ends.’ I really wanted to do it, but in the end I didn’t have the stomach lining for it. A lot of people flourish at Hollywood studios because they’re fear-based. I have a hard time relating to that, because I feel our biggest responsibility is to give the audience something they haven’t seen.” Fincher told Playboy that he would spend the next year working with Flynn on the HBO seriesUtopia, another project that he would also abandon, with Flynn finally bringing it to Amazon Prime this past summer (and, honestly, it could have used Fincher’s deft touch).
The same year the director confirmed to Little White Lies the report that the movie got caught up in the casting minutia. “You get over $200 million… all motion picture companies have corporate culture and corporate anxieties,” Fincher told the British outlet. “Once we got past the list of people we could cast as the different characters in the film, once we got past one or two names which made them very comfortable, making a movie at that price, it became this bizarre endeavor to find which three names you could rub together to make platinum… I just wanted to make sure I had the skill-sets I could turn the movie over to. Not worrying about whether they’re big in Japan.” So there you have it. Corporate politics poked holes in the hull; casting disagreements sunk it. And the commercial and critical indifference toJohn CarterandThe Lone Rangerdefinitely didn’t help matters.
Years later, I would find out that20,000 Leagues Under the Seagot a lot closer than you might have thought. Apparently it got to the point that a full-sized model of Fincher’s version of the Nautilus was trotted out for marketing meetings. They were bullish and excited. And Disney finally used that Australian tax credit in 2015 when filming ofPirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Talesbegan. And Disney was still not ready to give up on the material,with news in 2016thatThe WolverinefilmmakerJames Mangoldhad boarded the project, with a new version of the script (most recent revisions bySebastian Gutierrez) and a new title (Captain Nemo), leading some to believe it was more of a prequel project. Since that announcement, there hasn’t been much movement. Mangold went on to directLoganand the Best Picture-nominatedFord vs. Ferrariand signed on to take over fromSteven Spielbergfor the fifth Indiana Jones adventure (tentatively set to arrive in 2022). Maybe Nemo and the rest of the crew of the Nautilus is still underwater, waiting for the right time to reemerge. But whenever Disney circles back to the project, it will be hard not to think about what could have been.
