Disney Is Starting Work On A Live-Action Beauty and the Beast Film

They’d better not mess too much – the original animated feature was one of my favourites!

As nice as the above sounds, I think I’d prefer Disney to work on newer material; material not associated with their prior work. It ind of smells like beating a dead horse.

Oh great. Yet another fantasy work with a female lead reworked to be all about the man.

Wonderful. Excuse me while I go over her and bang my head against the wall. Because for all their flaws, the reason why so many of us hold the Disney fairytales close to our hearts is because they were some of the few pictures with women in the lead and who were significant.

As much as I love fairy tales and retold versions….lately there hasn’t been a lot of successes. Mirror Mirror was visually interesting, but too silly. Snow White and the Huntsman was terrible. From what I hear, Beastly was pretty sad (though I liked the book). On TV, I wasn’t impressed with Grimm, but I hear that I need to give Once Upon a Time another shot (though, being a Mainer, I’m having a hard time believing the “small Maine town” setting).

The Fables have really figured out how to cash in, haven’t they? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_of_Fables)

I really hope he’s actually a beast, otherwise I Will. Not. See. It.
it seems that every ‘new’ version of the story( every version, book or movie in the last decade, excluding beastly, the book, not the movie) it’s not beauty and the beast but “Beauty and the Hot-Guy With An Attitude Problem” Which is about as far from the fairytale as you can get, you know?
on that note, it’s my favorite fairy tale ( after the Little girl sold with the pears) so if anyone has some adaption recs for me, by all means share.

I hope it’s still a musical- maybe they’ll add in some of the broadway songs, that would be nice.

Is there really that much of a dearth of myths, legends, and fairy tales out there that Disney has to keep recycling the same ones into different POV films?

it smells more like “well we made a ton of money off this before, and now that the fans of this are grownups with kids of their own….. lets just update it, make it “hip” for the kids of today and rake in those buckets of cash again.”
I agree though, they need to plunder different fairy tales or (*gasp shock*) come up with some NEW stories to tell

I understand your point, and the recent Oz: The Great and Powerful is a horrible example of the diminishing of great female characters (and the feminist legacy of the Oz series). However, it has been a long-standing, and perfectly legitimate, literary tradition to take popular tales and to retell them from the perspective of different characters. Some examples are Grendel (Beowulf) and Wide Sargasso Sea (Wuthering Heights). Many of these retellings have brought to light female characters who were previously afterthoughts or hopelessly two-dimensional in their original tales.

And the most important part is what Jill says in the final sentence: “His story certainly is an interesting one.” That’s exactly why there are people out there who want to do a story from his perspective.

If you want recs, try Robin McKinley (if you haven’t already). She’s written two different tellings of Beauty and the Beast: Beauty, and Rose Daughter. Also, her vampire novel Sunshine isn’t really a retelling, but it’s hard not to notice a few similar themes/motifs. Also, it is the only recent vampire novel worth reading, IMHO.

I read Beauty for my Children’s lit class last year, It was, to date, the only adaption I’ve ever found that stays with the original tone- the beast is a really good guy and beauty is her own antagonist. I loved it!

I enjoyed the twist that they put on the story in Once Upon a Time, but otherwise… yeah. Make him an actual beast. Between CGI and makeup skills nowadays there is no excuse not to, and the whole point was that it was meant as a CURSE. He’s supposed to terrify pretty much everyone who sees him.

I am theoretically on board with focusing more on the Beast if they give us some background on the castle and its inhabitants. My friends and I kept coming up with all these questions during a recent rewatch of the Disney movie– what happened to his parents? Presumably there is a King and Queen off somewhere else actually ruling the country. Did they just pretend he died? Is it a super awkward subject at court? How is his return going to affect the succession? How is it that no one in the surrounding territory remembers that the castle was the Prince’s? If no one goes to the castle where are they getting food? etc etc.

There is a lot of material and interesting details that could be explored, though I doubt that Hollywood will bother with anything half so complex.

Beastly was so, so terrible. >_> Not only was the teenage romance awful, they managed to be incredibly offensive in the story regarding the black housekeeper and the blind teacher. (Played by Neal Patrick Harris. What he was even doing in that movie, I don’t know. Maybe the same reason he agreed to be in the Smurfs.) The premise could have been done well… if it hadn’t been just a cheap Twilight ripoff designed to lure in the tweens.

Once Upon a Time is really good. I would definitely give it another shot. I don’t know about the small Maine town thing (I’m from the Midwest) but the setting is generic enough you could probably pretend the town is set most anywhere that is vaguely foresty and has some hills.

one theory I read was that he was a bastard and/or younger son sent off to a country estate with some servants, and mom and dad pretended he didn’t exist.
maybe part of the enchantress’s spell made the nearby towns folk forget? or the castle was rumored to be cursed from a long, long time ago, even before Beast-who-needs-a-name was sent there, and no one bothered to tell Belle and her father.

Emma Watson as Belle? That certainly is an interesting choice, I can’t see it myself to be honest.

Beauty and the Beast is my favorite movie…but I’m unsure about this. Part of the reason why I love the original animated film is that the animation is gorgeous. I can’t imagine the Beast working as well outside of animation, honestly. I’m afraid he’ll just be some CGI thing that will look dated after a decade or two.