Disney’s plan to remake all their classic animated movies into hybrids of live-action and CGI will continue. After the mammoth success of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland and Robert Stromberg’s Maleficent – and the upcoming remakes of Cinderella, The Jungle Book and Beauty and the Beast – we have now learned that the flying elephant movie Dumbo will be next.
Unlike the other films Disney has targeted for “re-imagining,” Dumbo is a fairly straightforward story of a baby elephant with big ears who is viciously bullied, has nightmarish alcohol-infused hallucinations, loses his mother, encounters racially stereotyped birds and then learns how to fly. Okay, so maybe it’s not THAT straightforward, but the film has no villain to speak of, no potential for fight sequences, and no love interest either.
So who has Disney hired to turn Dumbo into a movie that can compete at the multiplex? None other than Ehren Kruger, the screenwriter behind the last three Transformers movies. According to Hollywood Reporter, Kruger (who will also co-produce Dumbo) is writing a screenplay that “involves an adaptation of the original movie while adding a unique family story that parallels Dumbo’s story.”
Related: Ehren Kruger on Robot Gods and Transformers 4
While that description is a little vague, it sounds an awful lot like Dumbo is going to be adopted by a human family, presumably one with a child who has enormous ears, gets drunk, accidentally gets his Mom sent to jail and has friends who will be uncomfortably racially stereotyped. Or perhaps not. (We rather hope not, don’t you?)
The new movie version of Dumbo would of course be the second live-action Dumbo after the Disney Channel’s 1980s TV series “Dumbo’s Circus,” which ran for an impressive 120 episodes. And then of course there’s Operation: Dumbo Drop, but we no longer speak of Operation: Dumbo Drop.
This Week in Film News – Week Ending 04/11/14
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.
This Week in Film News – Week Ending 07/11/14
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