Another of Disney’s live-action remakes is dead in the water. Since the early 2010s, Walt Disney Pictures has revisited its extensive library of animated classics to repurpose them for the modern day and age. Live-action remakes of Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, The Little Mermaid, and most recently Lilo & Stitch have been massive hits, both in terms of box office and critical success. However, others have fallen flat, with the underwhelming release of Snow White earlier this year prompting Disney to shift its strategy. After the live-action Tangled was paused earlier this year, another remake of a Disney classic has been canceled.
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Disney’s live-action reimagining of its 1970 animated film The Aristocats has seemingly been canceled, and it may be for the best. The film was first confirmed to be in the works in 2023, with Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson tapped to direct the tale about a family of Parisian felines catnapped by a greedy butler hoping to steal their inheritance. After sparse updates about the movie, Questlove confirmed in an interview on Score: The Podcast Wednesday that his The Aristocats live-action movie is no longer moving forward.
“A new administration came in, and then I was like, ‘Okay, well, this is what I plan to do, and dadada, do the song and dance, and here’s some of the music examples, and there’s some team I’m working with dadada,’” the Oscar-winning director said. “And then they had another administration shuffle, and it was like, ‘Okay well. All right.’ And by the third time I was just like, ‘Maybe this isn’t meant for me, because there’s also, at least, like right now, there’s so much options I have in pickings.’”
Although Questlove said he “would have loved to have done that project,” he explained that “there’s like 20 others that I can get to… there’s literally four other films. I’ll be working till, you know, 2029, 2030. So, just wasn’t meant to happen. Maybe it’ll happen in the future.”
What Does This Mean for Disney’s Live-Action Remakes?
The loss of The Aristocats live-action remake isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Bringing animated movies to life doesn’t always work well, especially when it comes to films focused on animals. We all remember how horrifyingly bad 2019’s Cats movie was, and although Disney’s own The Lion King remake fared well and was groundbreaking, the CGI lions did catch some flak for a lack of emotional range. It’s not a hard stretch to believe that The Aristocats would have fallen victim to the same things.
Live-action remakes have been the bread and butter for Disney in recent years, the studio leaning heavily into the idea of bringing its animated classics back to life for new generations of audiences. However, those remakes seem to have hit a snag more recently following the poor box office performance of Snow White. The movie has only grossed $145 million worldwide on a production budget of $270 million, and its underwhelming performance seems to have prompted Disney to reassess their live-action remake strategy. Once-planned remakes of Tangled, Hercules, Bambi, and Robin Hood are either delayed or altogether canceled, with The Aristocrats now joining that list.
That isn’t to say that live-action remakes aren’t still a priority for Disney, especially after the success of Disney’s live-action Lilo & Stitch. The movie has broken a number of box office records after grossing more than $1 billion worldwide, making it the second highest-grossing movie of the year so far. Disney’s live-action Moana, which will see Dwayne Johnson reprise his role as Maui, is poised to be another big release when it hits screens next year.
Are you disappointed to hear that The Aristocats is being paused? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!
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