Just recently we ran a story that had multiple big-name directors and the high-profile projects that their names were said to be possible candidates for. Usually those never end up playing out, but it now appears that one of those names is officially the man for the job.

Deadline is reporting that Sam Raimi has officially come on board Oz: The Great and Powerful, the new movie from The Walt Disney Company that will offer an alternate perspective to the 1939 classic, The Wizard of Oz.

The movie will go back before the ’39 film and the films before that to L. Frank Baum‘s wonderful original story. It was at first thought that it would follow a traveling snake oil salesman who attempts to escape his life by way of hot air balloon and ends up in the magical lands of Oz, where he becomes that familiar wizard. Now it sounds like instead, the man will be a circus wrangler who’s swept away by a tornado. Reports state that a rewrite of the script are planned, so who knows what the final script will hold.

The Raimi conformation held no indication as to whether or not Robert Downey Jr. would sign up to play the lead, though it does sound like he is still the top choice for it.

It looks like this will be the next project for Raimi after Sony decided to completely scrap the progress of Spider-Man 4, which was well in-progress at the time, and start over from scratch. The director was also hired to captain a movie based on the ultra-popular MMO game World of Warcraft, but that still looks to be a ways off, which this guy is not happy about at all.