With Maleficent raking in the cash and Kenneth Branagh and Jon Favreau hard at work onthe live-action Cinderella and The Jungle Book (respectively), it seems like nothing is going to stop Disney from revisiting all their old animated classics in a contemporary fashion. So it’s a little ironic that Disney’s next live-action effort will reboot a film that, over 20 years later, still feels like one of their most contemporary works: Beauty and the Beast, the first animated movie ever to be nominated for Best Picture. (It lost to The Silence of the Lambs. That was a weird year for the Academy.)
Variety reports that Disney has hired Oscar-winning screenwriter and respected director Bill Condon to bring Beauty and the Beast to life again. Evan Spiliotopoulos, the screenwriter of Hercules, The Battle for Terra and Bare Witness will write the screenplay. Don’t worry, it has nothing to do with that CW series. And Bill Condon is a classy guy, so he’ll probably throw in at least a few nods to Jean Cocteau’s surreal 1946 masterpiece La Belle et La Bete. Just you wait and see.
Like many of his contemporaries, Bill Condon got his start in genre fare, writing the screenplays for F/X 2: The Deadly Art of Illusion and directing the horror sequel Candyman II: Farewell to the Flesh. Since then he’s won an Oscar for his screenplay to the James Whale biopic Gods and Monsters, and directed the acclaimed drama Kinsey and popular musical Dreamgirls. He also directed the last two Twilight movies, but to be fair he did the best he could with them.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
