I’m going to blow my brains out the next time someone says they’re going to reboot something by making it “darker and more action packed”. The time after this one that is. I want to live and the Daily Express says Dakota Fanning is going to star in a new take on The Wizard of Oz, which of course, will be “darker and more action packed”. I think that’s code for “audiences have gotten stupider so we have to talk down to them”.

This particular Oz reboot, do-over, sequel, whatever you’d like to call it is the one Todd McFarlane has been planning for Warner Bros. since way back in 2007. At the time McFarlane was less concerned with how to make a good movie than he was with questions like, “How do we get people who went to ‘Lord of the Rings’ to embrace this?” Now if the Daily Express is to be believed (and it probably isn’t, British tabloids tend to lie a lot), he actually has a plot. The rumor claims this new Oz would be set in the present day and cast 15-year-old Fanning as Dorothy’s, presumably less musical, granddaughter.

A Wizard of Oz sequel sounds like a pretty good idea, but is this really the sequel we want? Actually several rather excellent sequels have already been written. L. Frank Baum went on to write numerous Wizard of Oz stories which brought Dorothy back to the magical land of Munchkins, witches, and wizards (though good luck finding any of them anywhere on bookstore shelves). In fact at least one of them was already turned into a sequel. Return to Oz anyone? Why not adapt more of them? Better still from a money hungry Hollywood perspective, all of Baum’s books are indeed much darker and even more action packed than the well-known Wizard of Oz film. Forget Dorothy’s daughter, we’re not done with Dorothy.