Emma Thompson is planning to turn her fantasy kid film Nanny McPhee into a franchise – and the next film will keep her out of the final Harry Potter films.
“I’m making my own ‘Nanny McPhee’ next year,” she tells MTV . “They mean much more to me.”
But while she’s planning to follow up Nanny with a new film, don’t go expecting it to follow on the same story. “The working title is Nanny McPhee and The Big Bang. It’s not a sequel, actually, it’s a new story.”
“One hundred years later”
In fact, it’s definitely a departure from the original. “The second film is set one hundred years later; the only thing that is the same is Nanny McPhee. It’s about two families: A family of country children, and a family of town children, both during the war. So it’s about evacuees, and the father is away at war.”
And given that she’ll be working on the film next year, it’ll mean she can’t return as Professor Trelawney in the last two Potter films.
“The Harry Potters are great big franchises that are something I’m not emotionally attached to or necessarily particularly creatively attached to," she says. "That’s more like doing a turn, whereas the Nanny McPhees are something I’ve written. The art is in those films, they’re very handmade, they’re something that’s very close to me. Those are the ones I really care about.”
Somehow we doubt the Potter franchise will collapse without her…
