We've had sparkly vampires, half-naked werewolves and increasingly weary teen wizards. Now, film and television executives are hoping that they can spin box office gold from the good, old-fashioned fairy story. With three versions of Snow White in pre-production, teen re-imaginings of Beauty and the Beast and Little Red Riding Hood due in cinemas soon, and all-action spins on Jack and the Beanstalk, Pinocchio and Hansel and Gretel coming next year, Hollywood is clearly betting that a revitalised "Once Upon a Time" format will turn beans into big bucks.
And they're not the only ones. This year's television pilots also have a fairy-tale theme, with shows such as NBC'S Grimm, described as a dark cop drama in which "characters inspired by Grimm's Fairy Tales exist", and ABC's Once Upon a Time, billed as a modern day take on the fairy-tale genre.
So why all the sudden interest in evil queens and wicked witches? In part, it's because these stories are in the public domain and, thus, the rights are free. As Catherine Hardwicke, the director of Red Riding Hood, told Entertainment Weekly: "They are known all over the world. Studios are enamoured with making something that already has built-in name recognition or a fan base."
Not, however, that these are the sort of films that you might take your children to see. We're not talking about Disney's animated princesses or a Shrek-style reworking of old stories for a young audience but rather about dark and distinctly gothic tales told with an older audience in mind.
Take Red Riding Hood, which opens in the UK on 15 April. Featuring Amanda Seyfried in wide-eyed ingénue mode, and a pair of just-the-right-side-of-hammy turns from Gary Oldman and Julie Christie, Hardwicke's atmospheric film nods more to Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves, a darkly enjoyable adaptation of short stories by Angela Carter, than it does to the original source material.
Spun off from an idea by Leonardo DiCaprio, who suggested that the Little Red Riding Hood story could work as a romantic thriller, and written by by David Leslie Johnson, who also wrote the superbly creepy Orphan, this Red Riding Hood is as concerned with the beast within as it is with the dangers of straying off the right path.
