Ava DuVernay Achieves a Milestone with $100M ‘A Wrinkle in Time’ Production
Director Ava DuVernay on the set during the filming of ‘Selma’ (Photo: Paramount Pictures, Atsushi Nishijima/AP)
Ava DuVernay was the first African-American woman ever to win the Best Directing prize at the Sundance Film Festival (for 2012’s Middle of Nowhere), and now, on the heels of her critically acclaimed 2014 historical drama Selma, she’s achieved another industry milestone.
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As reported by Deadline, the announcement of California’s latest tax credits (for film productions costing more than $75 million) reveals that DuVernay’s upcoming Disney project A Wrinkle in Time — an adaptation of novelist Madeleine L’Engle’s 1963 fantasy tale about a young girl who embarks on an adventure across strange worlds in search of her missing scientist father — will boast a budget exceeding $100 million. As Melissa Silverstein at ‘Women and Hollywood’ notes, it marks only the third time a $100 million film project has been led by a woman — following Kathryn Bigelow’s 2012 K-19: The Widowmaker and Patty Jenkins’ forthcoming Wonder Woman — and the first by an African-American woman.
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DuVernay took to Twitter to humbly remark upon the historic occasion.
Not the first capable of doing so. Not by a long shot. Thanks to @DisneyStudios for breaking this glass with me. https://t.co/iXJ9pgV7eP
— Ava DuVernay (@AVAETC) August 3, 2016
A Wrinkle in Time’s script was written by Chris Buck, who wrote and co-directed Disney’s Frozen. It will also feature Oprah Winfrey in an unspecified role. DuVernay’s next project, The 13th — a documentary about the American prison system, and its high-rate of African-American incarceration — will open this year’s New York Film Festival.
