According to Variety, Disney has hired Linda Woolverton, a seasoned blockbuster screenwriter, to get cracking on a sequel to the monster hit Alice in Wonderland. The writer has a history with the studio — writing Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King among others — and her work has gone on to earn towering amounts of money so the appeal is pretty clear on the business end. Not to mention the financial no-brainer of continuing this franchise. But what about the artistic side? Woolverton is an excellent writer, but as we saw with Alice in Wonderland, her work can also be turned into a drippy mess of unnecessary bizarreness that hoists visuals (and poorly CGI-ed dance moves) so far above story that it gets downright embarrassing. That’s not the only obstacle to quality with Alice in Wonderland 2 either. There are at least three that jump to mind. The urge to copy the model of the first unfortunate film. The element of new territory now that they’ve already covered a lot of Lewis Carroll‘s original work with “Adventures” and “Through the Looking Glass.” There are still other tales, like the Caucus Race to cover, and the 2010 film strayed from the books considerably, but it’ll be curious to see whether they stick mostly with the other film’s characters (Johnny Depp for sure) or go Return to Oz style, trying to introduce or create new ones. That’s a challenge without the safety net of Carroll’s work to guide them. They’re leaving the safe harbor where fans can

Production on Maleficent started on June 13th, and the movie won’t be in theaters until March 14th of (wait for it) 2014, but Disney has already released a teaser image of star Angelina Jolie as the iconic, evil witch queen who really hates Sleeping Beauty. To be fair, without Maleficent, the fair-haired heroine would just be called “Beauty,” and that name was already taken, so she probably wouldn’t have a cool nickname at all. Credit has to be given to Gregory Maguire’s “Wicked” for birthing a modern fascination with the villain’s side of the story (but mad respect to the old school “Grendel”), and the Robert Stromberg-directed fairy tale promises just that for Jolie. Although this will be the directorial debut for the veteran effects designer, the writing team features both Paul Dini and Linda Woolverton, so there’s a lot to be hopeful for. Plus, the cast also includes Elle Fanning, Juno Temple, Sharlto Copley and a ton of other solid names. Clicking on the image makes it largified. [Disney]

When I first saw the Hollywood Reporter piece on Melissa Rosenberg surpassing Linda Woolverton (The Lion King, Alice in Wonderland) as the highest-grossing female screenwriter, it took me a while to wrap my mind around it. After all, it’s the kind of statistic that only a baseball fan could love. It doesn’t take into account the thousands of other people and factors that go into making a film a world-wide financial smash, giving credit solely to the writer (and only if that writer has official credit on the movie). On the other hand, it’s the kind of fact that feels significant. That tells us a bit about the world we live in. Maybe in a way that upsets us. At its barest, it reveals that the female movie writer responsible for banking the most money did it mostly through the Twilight series – Step Up is the only non-Twilight property she’s credited for outside of her lengthy television resume. It also means she did it mostly through means of a book adaptation. After Breaking Dawn Part 1 topped $647m, her total landed at just over $2.56b.