Is there a new rule in Hollywood that if you’re a teen star with a breakout hit, you must immediately play a classic literary character, so that you’ll be taken seriously? True Grit’s Hailee Steinfeld has rushed off to the female half of Romeo & Juliet and now it appears Joel Courtney, the young actor at the centre of JJ Abrams’ Super 8, will be Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, in Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn.
Variety reports that he’s in talks for the role. Personally I’ve always found Tom Sawyer & Huck Finn to be insufferably twee, with the main reason its survived so long because it hammers the audience over the head with corny Americana and social comment about the 19th Century US life. That means it’s easy to teach to kids and for them to get what’s actually going on, and so it’s become it an easy classroom perennial. But hey, that’s just me, and a lot of people love it, so maybe a Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn movie is just what the world needs (if nothing else, it’ll have a long life on DVD, with teachers snapping up copies to show kids in classes for years to come). Jo Kastner is directing, with shooting starting in August. Purists will be left frothing though, as while Twain’s book are famously set in and around the Mississippi, the movie will instead be shot in Bulgaria.
As well as Tom Sawyer, Courtney’s also eyeing The Healer, which has been written by George Seafini, who will also direct. The film is about an ailing father who takes his two teenage kids into the woods to renew the bond they shared before a divorce. The trio are soon swept into a supernatural adventure in a haunted forest. Courtney’s characters would be a rebellious youth who has grown up resenting his father. Just as he begins to warm up to his estranged dad, an apparent tragedy threatens to separate them forever and hes left trapped in limbo between the living world and the afterlife. There’s no news on when it might be made, although it won’t be until after Tom Sawyer.