The Big Picture
- Hollywood has only focused on adapting "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" and hasn't explored the vast potential of other Oz books.
- Warner Bros. has always wanted to capitalize on "The Wizard of Oz" and has attempted various sequels and remakes.
- The fate of the animated film "Toto," a spin-off featuring Dorothy's dog, is uncertain amidst changes in Warner Bros.' animation division and competition with the upcoming film adaptation of "Wicked."
The original books chronicling the exploits of Oz were published for decades across the early years of the 20th century, with the most famous of these sagas being "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz," the first installment in the series which spawned the hit 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. Across many installments, author L. Frank Baum and other writers introduced a slew of other characters (Cayke the Cookie Cook hive, rise up), distinct locations in the domain of Oz, and even crossovers with other Baum novels like The Sea Fairies and Sky Island. The Oz lore went so deep that readers even got to eventually discover what the Tin Man's name was (Nick Chopper, for the record, because he was a woodsman, you see). There's so much material in here to exploit, one would've expected Hollywood to have already adapted these various follow-ups dozens of times over.
Instead, the endless Oz adaptations over the years have all been rooted in the characters and storylines from "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz". After all, that’s the one that inspired the 1939 musical everyone knows and loves and adaptations that cribbed from the lore of other Oz books (like the 1980s film Return to Oz) were infamous flops. That means Hollywood only wants to mimic the success of Dorothy going down the Yellow Brick Road rather than put in the effort to turn Ruggedo into the next bad boy movie icon. The ubiquity of motion pictures rooted in just this inaugural Oz tale even resulted in an animated Warner Bros. movie being commissioned named Toto, which would’ve told the story of The Wizard of Oz through the eyes of Dorothy’s plucky canine. What happened to this proposed feature? For that, we’ll have to do our own epic trip, though not down a brightly colored road but rather through the history of Wizard of Oz at Warner Bros…
Warner Bros. Has Always Wanted to Exploit “The Wizard of Oz”
For decades, The Wizard of Oz was one of the crown jewels of MGM, the studio that originally financed and released it. However, the cash-strapped outfit eventually got entangled in a deal with the Turner Broadcasting System, which eventually ensured that Turner (and later Warner Bros.) owned every MGM movie made before 1986. The original L. Frank Baum Oz books are in the public domain, so anyone can make new pop culture properties out of them. That’s why Wicked, Oz the Great and Powerful, Emerald City, and countless other projects exist without a trace of involvement from Warner Bros. However, Warner Bros. does own the initial Wizard of Oz movie as well as specific elements from it, such as the Wicked Witch of the West’s specific shade of green or the concept of the Ruby Slippers (they were originally silver in Baum’s books). With that information firmly planted in your head, dear reader, you’re guaranteed to impress any hot people you’re flirting with at the next social gathering you attend!
In all seriousness, that historical context is important to understand regarding why Toto would be so (conceptually) important to Warner Bros. The studio doesn’t have a monopoly on Oz stories, but it does lay claim to the Oz story and musical numbers people most widely know. Because of this, the studio has always been trying to make continuations or remakes of that initial Oz movie, though none got off the ground. Back in 2002, Warner Bros. commissioned a proper Wizard of Oz sequel called Surrender Dorothy that would've starred Drew Barrymore—a project that was still in development in 2010 alongside another major Oz blockbuster at the studio. At the end of the year, rumors emerged that Robert Zemeckis would be helming a straightforward remake of The Wizard of Oz at the studio. Warner Bros. had an iconic title in its library and the studio was eager to exploit it in some fashion.
Disney’s Oz the Great and Powerful and the prospect of a Wicked movie at Universal seems to have stifled some of WB’s ambitions about doing another Wizard of Oz movie…but this studio wasn’t going to be cowardly about those franchise ambitions for long. In July 2018, Warner Bros. and Warner Animation Group announced that Mark Burton would be penning a film adaptation of the Michael Morpurgo children's book "Toto" (the film would share the same name as its source material). It’s easy to see why the project would have a lot of appeal for Warner Bros., including that it being fully animated would immediately differentiate it from most other competing Oz movies. Plus, Warner Animation Group was fully enamored with exploiting other WB IP like the DC Comics and Hanna-Barbera characters. Why not also give Dorothy Gale’s pooch a movie?
By the start of 2020, Toto got a new screenwriter in the form of John August while Alex Timbers was selected to helm the movie at the end of the year. The latter figure’s presence here was a critical element given his extensive experience with musical productions. Warner Bros. was aiming to make Toto a musical extravaganza and got a veteran of the art form to ensure it could live up to that potential. The hiring of Timbers seems to have set the production in overdrive, in hindsight, as animation house Animal Logic announced in February 2021 that Toto would be animated at its Vancouver facility. Warner Bros. and Animal Logic had long shared a great relationship with animated features, with the latter studio providing the animated elements for big Warner Bros. hits like Happy Feet and The LEGO Movie. By the end of the year, production was moving smoothly enough for Warner Bros. to announce a February 2024 release date for Toto. Everything was going great…but Toto’s parent studio was about to get swallowed up by a force even more devious than any Wicked Witch that ever was…
“Toto” Appears to be in Limbo
When David Zaslav’s company Discovery bought up all the Warner Bros. entertainment entities and created WarnerDiscovery, the studio went through an immediate upheaval. This included Warner Animation Group, an entity that had been struggling at the box office in recent years thanks to flops like The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part and Space Jam: A New Legacy. A year into this merger, it was clear the animation studio would be going through some major changes when Toto was abruptly pulled off the release schedule just ten months before its release. By that summer, DreamWorks Animation veteran Bill Damaschke was confirmed to be leading this division of Warner Bros., which was now being called Warner Bros. Pictures Animation.
While it was clear now who would be running animated movies at Warner Bros., there was greater uncertainty surrounding what on Earth was going on with Toto. One problem the feature may have been struggling with was that a little movie called Wicked was finally on the horizon again. In 2018, when Toto was officially announced as going into production, Universal had given up on getting the feature out in time for Christmas 2019. It truly seemed like Wicked would just never come to the big screen, especially when Universal removed the title from its release schedule entirely in April 2020. Temporarily, it looked like Toto would have no competition from other Oz movies…then 2021 happened and the Wicked movie suddenly picked up steam like a charging locomotive. Universal was finally getting this project off the ground for a 2024 premiere, the same year as Toto.
Did Warner Bros. suddenly get cold feet about competing with another musical Wizard of Oz project and one based on a way more popular source material (that Wicked Broadway musical is everywhere, Toto’s children’s book source material, not so much)? It’s hard to tell, but it could be a reason the production suddenly went radio silent.Toto’s fate also seems to have been sealed by Warner Bros. brass shelving Coyote vs. Acme, another title championed by the last Warner Bros. Animation regime. While the studio eventually relented and let other studios look at purchasing Coyote vs. Acme, that was only after a massive outcry from the public. If the studio was willing to toss out a finished Wile E. Coyote movie, then a Toto feature was certainly going on the chopping block for a quick tax write-off.
Despite seeming like it came so close to existing, Toto currently appears poised to find a place alongside projects like Surrender Dorothy among unrealized attempts from Warner Bros. to make a sequel/extension/spin-off to that 1939 Wizard of Oz movie everyone loves so dearly. The studio’s track record on these kinds of projects is just not good and external factors like the WarnerDiscovery merger only exacerbated the typical problems associated with these projects. Perhaps someday, some concept art or animation tests from Toto will leak and audiences will get a chance to take a peek at what this musical could’ve looked like. For now, though, it doesn’t appear Toto will be traveling down a yellow brick road to a movie theater near you anytime soon.
The Wizard of Oz is available to stream on Max in the U.S.
