Hawkeye directors Bert & Bertie are staying in the Disney family. The duo, who helmed three episodes of the Marvel/Disney+ series, have signed on to direct a feature for Disney based on the theme park attraction Big Thunder Mountain.
Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap Entertainment and Ridley Scott’s Scott Free will produce, with Bert & Bertie directing from a script by Kieran and Michele Mulroney, the married screenwriting pair whose credits include Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows and the 2017 Power Rangers reboot.
Big Thunder Mountain, which is at multiple Disney parks, takes place in a mining town amid the gold rush of the 1800s. Disaster inevitably strikes the attraction, which is hit by either an earthquake (California, Paris), tsunami (Tokyo) or flash flood (Florida).
A decade ago, Disney-owned network ABC developed a western pilot based on the attraction from writer Ice Age: Continental Drift Jason Fuchs and Fast and Furious scribe Chris Morgan executive producing. That series didn’t make it off the ground.
Disney has already struck gold in the past by turning its theme park attractions into films, with the Pirates of the Caribbean spawning five films that starred Johnny Depp. It released Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt’s Jungle Cruise amid the pandemic, and has the Rosario Dawson starrer Haunted Mansion due out in 2023.
British duo Bert & Bertie directed the Sundance feature Troop Zero, and recently helmed episodes of the HBO Max series Our Flag Means Death. Deadline first reported the news of their involvement in the Big Thunder Mountain film.
Bert & Bertie are repped by Verve and the Nord Group.