Hollywood looks for a fairy-tale ending

All grown up, Hansel and Gretel return to the forest to exact revenge on their childhood tormentors. Snow White escapes the Evil Queen and takes up with a group of Shaolin monks. And after leaving Kansas, carnival barker Oscar Diggs remakes himself as a wizard in the Emerald City.

Childhood classics as seen through a fun-house mirror? Well, yes. But for the film business, it's also something more consequential: its future.

Movie studios are taking timeless stories from authors such as the Brothers Grimm and L. Frank Baum and reimagining them with a modern, playful sensibility. And they're using big stars to do it: Julia Roberts and Charlize Theron will each get to add "Snow White" to their résumé -- they'll play the evil queen in two versions of the bedtime tale (distinct from the third version, with the monks, from Walt Disney).

"What we have are stories that people have a general knowledge of but don't know the specifics," said veteran Hollywood producer Joe Roth, whose Oz movie, "The Great and Powerful," has James Franco playing a wizard and Mila Kunis a witch. "We believe we can retool and reboot, work out a new story while using technology to our advantage."

Roth helped kick-start the fairy-tale trend last year when he and Disney made "Alice in Wonderland." After a billion dollars at the worldwide box office, studio executives believe Roth might be on to something.

Already, two Grimm retellings have hit theaters -- "Red Riding Hood," reimagined with werewolves and an older protagonist by "Twilight" director Catherine Hardwicke, and "Beastly," essentially "Beauty and the Beast" set in a modern American high school with teen star Vanessa Hudgens.

Both movies were commercial and critical disappointments. But that doesn't seem to be slowing the bandwagon. Other upcoming adaptations include the Snow White films (Kristen Stewart will star in the Theron version, "Snow White and the Huntsman," and Lily Collins in the Roberts one, "The Brothers Grimm: Snow White"). Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton will play the adult brother and sister in "Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters," being produced by Will Ferrell's company.

Once confined to the world of animation, fairy-tale movies are now big-budget, live-action movies with A-list stars and expectations.

The trend, say Hollywood insiders, comes in part from the need to appeal to younger filmgoers (or at least a sense of our younger selves) as well as the industry's coveted grail of "pre-awareness" -- the notion that a movie is better served if audiences are already familiar with the title. And what could be more familiar than centuries-old childhood stories?

Kate Bernheimer, a professor at the University of Arizona and editor of Fairy Tale Review, cites a need, in a technologically crazed time, to reconnect with the nature of fairy-tale environments as well as the "uncanny pull that the 'ever after' holds in an age of extinction."

But she also says that while a fairy-tale renaissance does seem to come along every few decades -- witness Disney's resurgence two decades ago with "The Little Mermaid" and "Beauty and the Beast" -- the plots never really go away.

"So many kinds of stories the movies tell are fairy tales," she said, citing "Pan's Labyrinth" and the movies of David Lynch.