Timothee Chalamet is donning purple (and Hugh Grant is turning orange) for Warner Bros. new Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory reinvention, Wonka. Landing in Australia on December 14, the 2023 film looks like it may be redemption after the 2005 rework of the beloved Roald Dahl story directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp.

Wonka is poised as an origin story of Willy Wonka (Timothee Chalamet) and his fantastical beginnings as the world’s wildest confectioner. Key roles are teased in the trailer with Olivia Colman (The Crown), Sally Hawkins (The Shape of Water), Keegan-Michael Key (Key & Peel) and Rowan Atkinson (Love, Actually) all making appearances.

Other notable Brits gracing the Wonka-verse are Jim Carter (Downton Abbey), Simon Farnaby (Ghosts) and Rich Fulcher (The Mighty Boosh). 

We open with a young and ambitious Willy Wonka, pursuing his dream of opening a chocolate shop like no other, and the ‘chocolate cartel’ who are determined to crush his plans. Destiny intervenes by way of an orange-hued Hugh Grant as the fabled oompa loompa and the rest, as they say, is history.

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2023’s Wonka is set as a magical prequel to Dahl’s 1964 childhood classic, and evokes the same whimsy and insanity as Gene Wilder’s cult-classic Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory released in 1971.

Directed by Paul King (Paddington), and based on a screenplay he wrote with co-star Simon Farnaby, Wonka will be in Australian cinemas on December 14, 2023.

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