With Marc Webb’s Snow White preparing to hit theaters, the trend of Disney creating live-action or realistically animated remakes of its classic animated feature isn’t poised to stop anytime soon. Even though the modern version of this phenomenon began back in March 2010 with Alice in Wonderland, the hefty box office of titles like Mufasa: The Lion King indicates this strain of cinema is still going strong with audiences. Future projects from the Mouse House in this vein will include this summer’s Lilo & Stitch, July 2026’s live-action update of Moana, and developing incarnations of Hercules and Tangled. One potential project in this vein, though, doesn’t appear to be on the immediate horizon despite initially gaining a lot of momentum at the dawn of the 2020s.
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Bambi is considered a crown jewel in the Walt Disney Animation Studios canon and is still revered for its painterly animation to this day. However, a Bambi remake has been met with endless roadblocks over the last few years even as every other Disney Animation feature gets remade.
The Earliest Days of a Bambi Remake
After 2019, a year where Aladdin and The Lion King updates gave Disney over $2.4+ billion in combined worldwide grosses, it was obvious that Disney’s love for remaking classic animated movies wasn’t going anywhere. Thus, a realistically animated adaptation of Bambi was announced in January 2020. Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Lindsey Beer were penning the screenplay and Disney was hopeful this project could continue the success of The Lion King and The Jungle Book.
Two months after this project’s announcement, though, the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the film industry. Major Disney tentpoles slated to start filming in spring 2020, like The Little Mermaid, halted production until further notice. Naturally, projects deep in development, like Bambi, were not going anywhere anytime soon. Even the towering Mouse House was scrambling to come to terms with a new entertainment status quo in 2020. This meant Bambi would have to wait years for any further developments as Disney focused on just getting itself on stable ground.
In June 2023, though, Disney signed on Women Talking writer/director Sarah Polley, just a few months removed from her Oscar win, to help the project. It was a major get, echoing the other indie darlings the Mouse House had secured for past Disney remakes like David Lowery helming Pete’s Dragon and Peter Pan & Wendy. This development also revealed further key creative personnel involved in the project, including that Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster were now writing the script. Famous musician Kacey Musgraves had also penned new tunes for the musical, which promised to traumatize a new generation of children with its frank handling of death.
[RELATED: Is Disney Disrespecting Animation as an Artform With Live-Action Remakes?]
Where Did Bambi Go Wrong?
Nine months after Polley signed on to Bambi, she left this project for undisclosed reasons. It was a crushing blow for the production, and with Disney failing to replace Polley in the last year, it’s clear the Bambi remake is, at the very least, no longer a priority project. Remakes of pre-1960 Disney Animation features have a mixed box-office track record, particularly with 2019’s flop Dumbo. This reality likely informed why Disney’s costly 2022 Pinocchio remake got sent to Disney+.
Considering this factor, it’s probably that Disney opted to push its resources into exploiting more modern animated fare like Moana and Tangled for remakes rather than trying to turn Bambi into a modern box-office phenomenon. Plus, making a Bambi remake in the realistic animation style of Jungle Book and Lion King would be such an expensive proposition that Bambi would need to make $900+ million. If The Little Mermaid couldn’t quite hit $600 million globally, it’s unlikely Bambi could reach the box office heights needed to make it lucrative.
On top of all that, all the brutal material in Bambi (including a quail losing her mind as she hears a hunter approaching) likely made the feature a nightmare to translate to modern audience sensibilities. Even with all these problems, Disney’s controversial dedication to these remakes over the last 15 years means it isn’t impossible that Bambi could come back to life someday or even in the near future. For now, though, Disney’s assortment of remakes appears to involve Disney Animation classics other than Bambi. In other words, Bambi’s mom is safe. For now.
Bambi is now streaming on Disney+.
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