The live-action remake of Disney’s Tangled has hit a snag. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Disney has paused development, possibly indefinitely. This shouldn’t come as a shock, because the most recent live-action adaptation of an animated Disney classic, Snow White, has been a massive commercial and critical failure. This followed months of (mostly manufactured) controversy surrounding the film, which had a bloated 270 million dollar budget. The Tangled remake was to be directed by The Greatest Showman‘s Michael Gracey, from a script by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson. Rumors floated about that Agatha All Along star Kathryn Hahn would play Mother Gothel.
For the better part of the last 15 years, the live-action remakes of animated classics have been a license to print money for the studio. Movies like Alice in Wonderland, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, and The Jungle Book all cleared a billion dollars. Even the ones that didn’t quite make that level of box office, like The Little Mermaid and Cinderella, were still very successful. But audiences wear out from certain concepts, and this just might be one of them. We suspect Hercules may be next to go. Eventually, we think Disney will return to making these, as they’ve proven to be more successful than not.
Tangled was the beginning of a return to animated fairy tales for Disney back in 2010. This came after a long period of focusing on other kinds of stories. Its success directly led to Frozen a few years later. But Hollywood studios are very reactionary, and the failure of Snow White has no doubt spooked them for now. This is also Disney, the same studio that canceled all the “Star Wars Story” films after Solo underperformed. But sooner or later, we expect to see live-action versions of Rapunzel and Flynn Rider on the big screen. It’s inevitable, whether we like it or not. It just may take quite a bit longer.
Content shared from nerdist.com.