Avengers Directors Update Disney’s Hercules Remake From Wonder Woman 1984 Writer

Avengers directors Anthony and Joe Russo say they’re “still in the process of finding” the heart of Disney’s live-action Hercules, the Russo-produced remake of the 1997 animated film. The next Disney re-imagining from producers Karen Gilchrist (Jon Favreau’s The Lion King, The Mandalorian) and Jeffrey Silver (Disney’s live-action Beauty and the Beast, the upcoming The Little Mermaid), Hercules attached the Marvel moviemakers as producers in April. That same month, the studio tapped Dave Callaham (Wonder Woman 1984, Marvel Studios’ Shang-Chi) to develop the script about the Greek god who goes from zero to hero when he battles underworld ruler Hades and a legion of Titans.

“We have an incredible writer on it, Dave Callaham, and he’s off on script. We should be seeing something in the next week or two, I think,” Joe Russo told Collider. Asked if Hercules will carry over the original film’s music, Russo said, “We’re keeping that all under wraps for now. We want the audiences to have some discoveries about what’s fresh about our take.”

Earlier this year, the AGBO co-founders said music would “certainly be a part” of their version of Hercules. But as the live-action re-imagining comes together, Anthony Russo notes they’re “still in the process of finding it.”

“These are projects that are in the early days and there’s a long road of sort of creative experimentation that goes on before we really know what the movie is,” Anthony said.

In May, the Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Endgame directors revealed they’re approaching Hercules like a Marvel movie: one inspired by a past work but not an exact translation.

“I think you always have to bring something new to the table because from our perspective as storytellers, it’s not compelling for us to do a literal translation. We’ve already done that with our Marvel films,” Anthony told Collider earlier this year. “We don’t do literal translations of the comics because we feel like if you want that story you can go read that story. We’re going to give you a different story. I think we’ll do something that’s in the vein of the original and inspired by it, but we also bring some new elements to the table.”

Hercules is among the many projects produced by the Russo’s AGBO, the production company behind Chris Hemsworth’s Netflix action hit Extraction and the Tom Holland-starring drama Cherry.

“Both us and our kids are Hercules fanatics. And we had heard that Disney was interested in revisiting it and we’re in love with the original,” Anthony said in May. “And we made a case as to why we felt we would be right to produce that film and here we are.”

Disney has not set a release date for Hercules.