Harry Potter alumni Emma Watson and Daniel Radcliffe are lining up leading roles in two new versions of well-known tales: Cinderella and Frankenstein respectively.
Watson, fresh from the well-liked teen flick The Perks of Being a Wallflower, is being courted for Disney's live-action version of the Cinderella fairy story, to be directed by Kenneth Branagh.
Watson, 22, had a somewhat tentative start to her post-Potter acting career, taking on a TV movie of Noel Streatfeild's Ballet Shoes and a small role in My Week With Marilyn as she appeared to concentrate more on fashion-related work. But the success of Perks has seen her sign up to more substantial projects: she has a leading role in Sofia Coppola's celeb-thief drama The Bling Ring, plays herself opposite James Franco in Evan Goldberg's metatextual comedy This Is the End, and is attached to Guillermo del Toro's Beauty and the Beast.
Cinderella is seen very much in the mould of Disney's Alice in Wonderland and Oz the Great and Powerful, both highly visual reworkings of familiar tales. Cate Blanchett has already been cast to play the wicked stepmother and filming is likely to be under way later this year, whether or not Watson takes the role.
Radcliffe, meanwhile, is set to play Igor in Frankenstein, a new take on Mary Shelley's classic gothic horror novel to be directed by Scots film-maker Paul McGuigan.
The hunchbacked servant/lab assistant – most memorably portrayed by Marty Feldman in Mel Brooks's parody Young Frankenstein – is the centre of McGuigan's film, even though the character does not appear in Shelley's original. According to the Wrap, it will be "a sci-fi take on this classic story about a creature produced through a scientific experiment", and Radcliffe's character is "pathologically dirty and dressed in old clown's clothing".
Radcliffe recently proved his chops in period horror with the Susan Hill adaptation The Woman in Black, and will next be seen as Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in Sundance hit Kill Your Darlings.