Walt Disney Pictures made a lot of great live action and animated movies back in the 1970s, but unless you’re of a certain age (i.e old), you may have never heard of or seen the 1977 live action-animated combo musical Pete’s Dragon when you were a kid. (You might also argue whether it was “great.”)
Fortunately, nothing from the ’70s stays dead for long and Walt Disney Pictures clearly sees that there’s an interest in dragons with the success of “Game of Thrones” and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug… so they’re bringing Pete’s Dragon back!
David Lowery may have seemed like an odd choice to co-write the script for this remake with Toby Halbrooks, since Lowery’s most recent and acclaimed indie Ain’t Them Bodies Saints was a Southern Gothic crime-thriller that didn’t exactly scream “Disney!” but apparently the company liked what they saw, because now Lowery is in talks to actually direct the movie.
Lowery’s previous film, St. Nick, was about runaway children who had to fend for themselves in the wild, which is in line with the original Pete’s Dragon, which starred Sean Marshall as an orphan with abusive adoptive parents who finds a dragon. It co-starred acting vets like Mickey Rooney, Shelley Winters and Red Buttons.
Lowery and Halbrooks have reinvented the story for modern audiences and according to TheWrap, it’s not expected to be a musical. It isn’t clear whether Pete’s Dragon will be Lowery’s next movie or if he will tackle an adaptation of Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds, about the author’s experiences as an Army machine gunner in Iraq, first.
