There are stills of Emily Blunt, James Corden, Anna Kendrick, Chris Pine and Meryl Streep in Into the Woods and we also got a few solid shots of them in the film’s trailer too, but what about Johnny Depp’s The Wolf? Depp got a title card in that trailer, but then he just hid behind a tree. Now it turns out, that was a good thing.
The new edition of Entertainment Weekly puts the spotlight on Rob Marshall’s rendition of the Stephen Sondheim musical with four different collector’s covers and one of them gives us our very first look at Depp in full costume and makeup. Hit the jump to check out the Into the Woods covers for yourself. The film also stars Lilla Crawford, Mackenzie Mauzy, Daniel Huttlestone, Tracey Ullman and Christine Baranski, and is set to hit theaters on December 25th.
Here’s what Marshall told EW about his rendition of Into the Woods:
“I didn’t want this to look like a cartoon world. It’s not sunny, sunny, sunny — we wanted a sense of danger.”
These covers certainly aren’t “sunny, sunny, sunny,” but it does look a little bit like a cartoon world here. Perhaps it’s the awkward poses and the bright costumes paired with that blue background, but there’s something silly and fake about these visuals. And Depp? Well, he just looks ridiculous. It’s going to take quite the performance to make that getup feel natural in the least.
The rest of the characters don’t look bad per se, but the magazine cover format does make them come across a bit hokier and even somewhat satirical compared to the footage from the trailer. For example, look at Streep. In the trailer, poster and film stills she’s disheveled and creepy. Here, however, we’ve got the wannabe supermodel version of the character. Streep looks great, but how is that selling the movie? Regardless, she's thrilled to portray The Witch:
“I’ve been offered many witches over the years, starting when I was 40, and I said no to all of them. But this was really fun because it played with the notion of what witches mean. They represented age and ugliness and scary powers we don’t understand. So here’s my opportunity to say, here’s what you wish for when you’re getting old.”
Streep’s cover doesn’t reflect that idea whatsoever, but it does sound like an intriguing approach to the character. Hopefully this is just an issue of the folks behind these images getting a little too carried away with trying to deliver super glossy covers.
