Well, I suppose this bit of news was bound to happen at some point. The Alice in Wonderland sequel for Tim Burton’s inexplicably $1 billion dollar grossing film is now set to be released on May 27, 2016. While The Muppets director James Bobin will be the director this time around, Mia Wasikowska and Johnny Depp are apparently both set to reprise their roles as Alice and The Mad Hatter respectively.
While making a sequel to a billion dollar is pretty much a no-brainer for any studio, I still don’t really think making one for Alice in Wonderland is a very good idea. There is no possible way the sequel could hope to match the box-office numbers of the first movie. For starters, Alice in Wonderland was released at a time when 3-D was still a relatively fresh idea (Avatar had just been released about 3 months before) and we were still gullible enough to shell out an extra three bucks for anything with a 3-D release.
Also, without Tim Burton in the director’s chair, it’s hard to imagine that the sequel would have the same appeal. While James Bobin is undoubtedly a talented director (The Muppets was probably my second favorite movie of 2011), I just don’t see him being able recreate the zany kind of atmosphere that the audience seemed to really enjoy with the first one.
The other problem is that Alice in Wonderland relied pretty heavily on the star power of Johnny Depp which is taken a pretty big hit in the last few years. Between the high profile box-office bombs of Dark Shadows, The Lone Ranger, and even his Jack Sparrow movies starting to get a little tired, Depp is not nearly as big of a star of he was three years ago. While that could change between now and when the Alice in Wonderland sequel eventually comes out, I’m not exactly holding my breath.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter