For the last couple of years there’s been much talk about Dark Shadows, a film version of the 1960s US supernatural soap opera, which Tim Burton and Johnny Depp have been putting together. To be honest, much of the time it’s almost seemed like the sort of vanity project that would never happen – two guys who have a love for something from their youth wanting to revisit it, and asking a studio to spend millions to indulge them – however this is Burton and Depp, two people who currently have the power to get a movie made about their own toenails if they wanted to.
However now Deadline reports that the movie has finally gotten the go ahead, everyone’s schedules have been cleared and it’ll go before the camera next April (pushed back from a previously rumoured January start). Depp will play vampire Barnabas Collins, a character he was obsessed with as a kid. Not much more is known about the actual plot of the movie, although the original Dark Shadows series followed the Collins family and saw them tromented by all sorts of supernatural goings on, from vampires and werewolves to ghosts and witches. It ran for an impressive 1245 episodes between 1965 and 1971.
Seth Grahame-Smith, best known as the author of Pride & Prejudice & Zombies and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter has written the script. As yet no release date has been set, although expect it sometime in 2012.