So now there will be two Abraham Lincoln movies — Robert Redford‘s The Conspirator and Tim Burton‘s just-announced Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter — before Steven Spielberg gets off his sorry sagging ass and pulls the trigger on his years-delayed, Tony Kushner-scripted Lincoln project, which once upon a time (i.e., five years ago) was seen as a golden opportunity for Liam Neeson to portray the nation’s 16th president.
Burton would be teaming with Timur Bekmambetov, the Russian-born, animal-level director of Wanted — i.e., one of the stupidest and most absurdly illogical high-octane thrillers ever made — on an adaptation of Seth Grahame-Smith‘s novel “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,” which portrays the Great Emancipator as “an ax-throwing, highly trained vampire assassin,” to borrow from a sentence in a Variety story.
The Burton-Bekmambetov flick sounds cool, but I’m more interested in an Honest Abe Lincoln/vampire-killing video game. I’m fairly certain that John Ford and Raymond Massey would feel the same way if they were with us. This story needs a quote from Doris Kearns Goodwin.