Back in February I reported that the new Spike Jonze/Dave Eggers film adaptation of everyone’s favorite children’s book Where the Wild Things Are was in a bit of trouble for being TOO scary for the young’uns.

According to New York Magazine (via Playlist), the film is still not doing well. Hot on the heels of Speed Racer’s big box-office upset, Playlist is reporting that Jon Vitti (of Alvin and the Chipmuncks screenwriting fame…Yikes!) has been hired to help out, and that the production is “deeply troubled”.

There were rumors that Jonze had been fired from the project after Warner Brothers scheduled re-shoots and ordered rewrites of several scenes. However, Jonze is reportedly still part of the project, despite not having final say on the end result.

The film was originally slated to be released in May of 2008 (umm…right now!), but was then pushed to October of 2008, and now has been pushed all the way back to October 2009. Warner Brothers is apparently still worried about the film being too scary for kids and too confusing, so the rewrites and re-shoots are aimed at making the story more “clear”.

What could possibly be unclear about Where the Wild Things Are? Sounds like the studio is trying to make the quirky and sometimes troubling story more palatable, at the expense of Jonze’s vision. Over at the MTV Movies Blog they’re reporting that Forrest Whitaker (the voice of the Wild Thing ‘Ira’) wants the studio to leave the film as is, saying that Max’s mother “ends up having a boyfriend that becomes like a monster to him…people have to build trust with the people their parent starts to date…These are real issues that the character deals with, and I hope that [the filmmakers] continue to explore them, because kids need to see that; they need to see that other kids are dealing with it.”

Some people are telling Jonze to leak his original cut, before the Warner Brothers intervention, but most think that’s unlikely to happen.

What do you think the final cut will be when the film is (hopefully) released in 2009? Will it be Jonze’s portrait of a disturbed young boy, or a lighter interpretation of the classic kids tale? Which would you prefer to see?