Director Gore Verbinksi will follow up his billion-dollar Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy with an animated film with a budget estimated at $100 million to be written by John Logan (The Aviator, Sweeney Todd). The film is skedded for a 2010 release, and the title and plot details are unknown at this time. Verbinksi’s last PG film, as I’m assuming this flick will be rated G or PG, was 1997’s rather impressive Mouse Hunt.

The film is being produced by Graham King (Blood Diamond, The Departed, Next), and he gave some interesting details to [1] Variety about a few of his other unrelated films. He’s currently adapting the graphic novel The Invention of Hugo Cabaret, “about a 12-year-old orphan living in a Paris train station in 1930 and embroiled in a mystery involving his father and a robot.” Martin Scorsese has been attached to direct it for a year now, and it seems that is still the case. King also said that the Johnny Depp-vehicle Shantaram is not dead, and he’s also still developing the Puerto Rico-set Hunter S. Thompson novel The Rum Diary, which Depp is also still attached to.

Discuss: Are you excited by this news? What did you want to see Verbinski do next?