John Lee Hancock (Blindside) is reportedly in talks to direct Saving Mr. Banks, a feature film based on the true story of how Mary Poppins came to be a Walt Disney classic. Disney is in the process of acquiring the Kelly Marcel Black List script retelling the story of the 14-year-long courtship of Australian author, P.L. Travers by Walt Disney himself in order to secure the film rights to Mary Poppins. No company would be a better fit than Disney, who owns the rights to the 1964 classic starring Julie Andrews, Dick Van Dyke and David Tomlinson, as Mr. Banks. Hit the jump for more on the project, including who might be stepping into Walt Disney’s shoes.

Disney has picked up Kelly Marcel‘s Black List script, Saving Mr. Banks.  The story centers on how Disney persuaded P.L. Travers sold the studio the rights to make Mary Poppins, and how Travers was dissatisfied with aspects of the film, especially since the story was deeply personal to her.  Per Deadline, “Mary Poppins was highly personal, and reflected hardships in her own life and her relationship with her father, who died when she was 7.”

The movie became one of the biggest hits in Disney’s history, but Travers hated the animated sequences, and she refused to sell any of her other works to Disney (somehow, Disney managed to survive).  Present-day Disney is already looking to make the film a star-studded affair, and according to Deadline, “There have been rumors of the script being considered by Tom Hanks (for Walt Disney) and Meryl Streep (for Travers).  I don’t know if I can buy Hanks as an anti-Semite.

Now before we start getting readers foaming at the mouth (that’s probably from rabies and you really need to get that checked out) and losing our journalistic integrity (we have some and you know it), let me say this: registering domain names is absolutely no indication that there’s been a greenlight on a particular project.  At best it means that there’s been the slightest sliver of interest within a studio and they want to make sure they own all relevant domain names before they’re swiped by Internet squatters (the folks who buy up thousands of domain names in their hopeless quest that some company will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to release the domain).

But Disney has recently registered some interesting domains for films like “Monsters, Inc. 2″, “The Tiger King”, and “World War Robot”.  Hit the jump for details.