Helena Bonham Carter as The Red Queen in ‘Alice in Wonderland’

While director Tim Burton will not return for Through the Looking Glass, the sequel to 2010’s Alice in Wonderland, Cinema Blend reports his two favorite actors Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter will both reprise their roles as The Mad Hatter and The Red Queen respectively. Through the Looking Glass will be the seventh film to feature both Depp and Bonham Carter, but only the second time without Tim Burton as the director after last year’s The Lone Ranger. As we have previously reported, Mia Wasikowska will also return as Alice and Sacha Baron Cohen will appear in the still-unnamed villain role. Linda Wooverton, who wrote both Alice in Wonderland and the upcoming Maleficent, will write the sequel and James Bobin (The Muppets) will direct.

The plot to Through the Looking Glass has yet to be teased but will almost certainly be original material. Despite sharing the name of the first novel, Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland set itself up as a sequel to the events of the book with an adult Alice returning to Wonderland after traveling there as a child. While the plot of the film diverged significantly from anything author Lewis Carroll wrote, Wonderland (2010) had more in common with Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There than the original novel. Carrol’s sequel featured a war between The Red and White Queens leading armies of living chess pieces. As observant readers/viewers may notice, Bonham Carter’s character in the films is The Red Queen, not The Queen of Hearts who normally appears in Alice in Wonderland. The 2010 film also had characters like The White Queen (Anne Hathaway), the Jabberwocky (Christopher Lee), and Tweedledum & Tweedledee (Matt Lucas) all of whom, in the books, only appear in Looking Glass.

With Lewis Carroll’s original story seemingly exhausted, we await hearing what bizarre turns the new film will take. Audiences may follow Alice Through the Looking Glass beginning on May 27, 2016.