Disney's Live-Action Aladdin Director Gives Update on Sequel

By Cameron Bonomolo

Guy Ritchie hopes to make magic happen a second time: the director has "ideas" for Aladdin 2. Released in 2019, Disney's live-action remake of the 1992 animated film starred Mena Massoud as the eponymous street rat-turned-prince, Will Smith as the wish-fulfilling Genie, and Naomi Scott as the outspoken Princess Jasmine. After Ritchie's Aladdin re-imagining grossed more than $1 billion at the worldwide office, Disney put a sequel into development in early 2020 and announced a Disney+ spinoff series starring Billy Magnussen's Prince Anders. In a new interview with Collider for his upcoming film Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, Ritchie revealed the latest on Aladdin 2:

"I'd very much like to," Ritchie said about returning for the Aladdin sequel. "I can't tell you how much I enjoyed that experience. It was a great experience. That whole Disney thing, as you can imagine, is such a professional outfit. Just from that perspective, it was so much fun."

Ritchie continued: "I would very much like to. We'll wait and see. We have been kicking some ideas around for some time now, but it'd be great to do. It would be great to go back there."

Aladdin was the ninth highest-grossing movie of 2019, which also saw the release of Disney's Jon Favreau-directed Lion King remake that roared to $1.6 billion globally as the second-biggest movie of the year behind Marvel's Avengers: Endgame. Disney is developing a follow-up to that film, with filmmaker Barry Jenkins directing the prequel titled Mufasa: The Lion King.

In 2019, producer Dan Lin told ComicBook that a potential Aladdin sequel would tell a new story. The original animated film spawned two direct-to-video sequels, Aladdin: The Return of Jafar and Aladdin and the King of Thieves, plus a three-season animated series.

"We're looking at a lot of different source material, and it's not going to be based on one singular source," Lin said. "We're going to take the best of everything that's been done before and create something fresh and new." 

After the box office success of 2019's Aladdin, Lin told ComicBook, "When we first made the movie, we wanted to just make the best movie we could and let audiences tell us if they wanted to see more. And I would say, resoundingly audiences, want to see more."

"They've watched this movie multiple times. We have lots of fan letters about people who really go back, and they bring their friends and bring their family. And so we feel like there's more story to tell," Lin continued. "We are going to treat it the same way we treat the original Aladdin movie and not do a shot-by-shot remake of anything that's been done before. We're really looking at what's been done before in the past and the home video, and there's just more story to tell with the underlying materials. So without giving away too much, we are certainly exploring where we can go with this franchise."

Aladdin is available to stream now on Disney+.

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