Ready to go on an adventure through time and space?
Walt Disney Pictures debuted the teaser trailer for Ava DuVernay's A Wrinkle in Time during the D23 Expo in Anaheim, Calif., Saturday. Adapted from Madeleine L'Engle's 1962 science fiction novel, the movie, written by Frozen's Jennifer Lee, is set for release in 2D and IMAX on March 9, 2018.
Catherine Hand and James Whitaker produced A Wrinkle in Time.
The movie boasts an all-star cast that includes Rowan Blanchard, Zach Galifianakis, André Holland, Mindy Kaling, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Deric McCabe, Will McCormack, Michael Peña, Levi Miller, Chris Pine, Storm Reid, Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon and Bellamy Young. Kaling, Winfrey and Witherspoon star as Mrs. Who, Mrs. Which and Mrs. Whatsit, respectively.
Reid, who made her feature film debut in 12 Years a Slave, stars as 13-year-old Meg Murray. Along with her bright brother Charles Wallace Murray (McCabe) and her popular best friend Calvin O'Keefe (Miller), Meg journeys to an alternate dimension to rescue her father, Dr. Alexander Murry (Pine), from the evil forces who are holding him prisoner on another planet.
The cast of A Wrinkle in Time appeared onstage at D23.
"I'm such a Disney fan," Witherspoon said. "Any time they call I'm like, 'What is it? I'll do it!' I just love Disney!"
Winfrey delighted fans when she recreated her iconic Oprah Winfrey Show moment, shouting, "You get a poster and you get a poster!" and "Everyone gets a poster!"
DuVernay is the first woman of color to direct a live-action movie with a production budget over $100 million. "I went to school in Compton and it wasn't on my reading list," she jokes with Entertainment Weekly. "I saw so much beauty in it, but also so much meaning. She's a very radical thinker and she embedded her sense of what society should and could be in this piece, and a lot of it I agree with. And through that, the story of this girl saving the world and being out there in the universe slaying the darkness, it also says a lot about slaying our own dragons."
Reid won the lead role after beating out thousands of other young actresses.
"The first image [I had in my head] was to place a brown girl in that role of Meg, a girl traveling to different planets and encountering beings and situations that I'd never seen a girl of color in," DuVernay says. "All of those scenes struck my fancy, and then it was also something that [Disney VP of production] Tendo Nagenda said to me, which I'll never forget. One of the things that really made me want to read it was when he said, 'Ava, imagine what you would do with the worlds.' Worlds! 'Planets no one's ever seen or heard of,' he said. There aren't any other black women who have been invited to imagine what other planets in the universe might look and feel like. I was interested in that and in a heroine that looked like the girls I grew up with."
As for Kaling, Winfrey and Witherspoon, the director tells Entertainment Weekly, "My whole process with this film was, 'What if?' With these women, I wondered, could we make them women of different ages, body types, races? Could we bring in culture, bring in history in their costumes? And in the women themselves, could we just reflect a fuller breadth of femininity?"
A Wrinkle in Time was shot on location in California and New Zealand.