First Look at Ava DuVernay's 'A Wrinkle in Time'

08/31/2017 04:23 pm EDT

Disney is prepping a fantasy adventure for all ages. Ava DuVernay will direct the film adaptation of Madeleine L'Engle's 1962 classic fantasy tale A Wrinkle in Time and fans can now get their first look at the film's cast in costume.

New photos released via Entertainment Weekly, which can be seen in the attached gallery, offer our first look at Chris Pine as Mr. Murry, Storm Reid as Meg, Levi Miller as Calvin, Reese Witherspoon as Mrs. Whatsit, Mindy Kaling as Mrs. Who, and Oprah Winfrey as Mrs. Which.

DuVernay is known for heavier, reality-based fare like Selma and the documentary 13th. She discovered A Wrinkle in Time as an adult and connected with the science fantasy story's themes and worldview.

Next: 'Toy Story' 4 Finds A New Director

"I saw so much beauty in it, but also so much meaning. [L'Engle is] a very radical thinker and she embedded her sense of what society should and could be in this piece and a lot of it I agree with," says DuVernay. "And through that, the story of this girl saving the world and being out there in the universe slaying the darkness, it also says a lot about slaying our own dragons."

With a firm foundation she could believe in, DuVernay went about crafting her own vision for the story.

"The first image [I had in my head] was to place a brown girl in that role of Meg, a girl traveling to different planets and encountering beings and situations that I'd never seen a girl of color in," she says. "All of those scenes struck my fancy, and then it was also something that [Disney VP of production] Tendo Nagenda said to me, which I'll never forget. One of the things that really made me want to read it was when he said, 'Ava, imagine what you would do with the worlds.' Worlds! 'Planets no one's ever seen or heard of,' he said. There aren't any other black women who have been invited to imagine what other planets in the universe might look and feel like. I was interested in that and in a heroine that looked like the girls I grew up with."

Next: First Look At Nickelodeon's 'Hey Arnold' Movie

In A Wrinkle in Time, Meg Murry and her little brother, Charles Wallace, have been without their scientist father, Mr. Murry, for five years, ever since he discovered a new planet and used the concept known as a tesseract to travel there. Joined by Meg's classmate Calvin O'Keefe and guided by the three mysterious astral travelers known as Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which, the children brave a dangerous journey to a planet that possesses all of the evil in the universe.

A Wrinkle in Time is based on Madeleine L'Engle's 1962 novel of the same name. The film is directed by Ava DuVernay and written by Jennifer Lee. The film stars Storm Reid, Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling, Levi Miller, Deric McCabe, Chris Pine, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Michael Peña, André Holland, Zach Galifianakis, and Oprah Winfrey.

A Wrinkle in Time opens in theaters on March 9, 2018.

Disclosure: PopCulture. is owned by Paramount. Sign up for Paramount+ by clicking here.