In the past few years, Walt Disney Pictures has had great success with live-action versions of their most popular animated features, most recently seen with Maleficent, which has grossed $600 million worldwide so far. Disney also has a live-action Cinderella out early next year and Jon Favreau is developing a live-action The Jungle Book.
Realizing what can be done with CG to create realistic animals (as seen in this week’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes), Disney is moving forward with a live-action version of one of their beloved animated classics, Dumbo, hiring “Transformers” writer Ehren Kruger to write the adaptation.
Produced by Kruger with Justin Springer, the movie will have the same premise of a bashful elephant with inordinately large ears who goes on an adventure with a mouse after his mother is locked up after defending him. (SPOILER if you haven’t seen the cartoon!) He eventually learns to fly using his ears with the help of a magic feather.
The film is likely to have a “strong family component,” according to TheWrap, along the lines of some of the other Disney classics reinvented for modern audiences. For years, it was rumored that Disney was trying to bring the 1941 animated feature to Broadway as a musical but those plans seemed to have sputtered out with no recent word on that happening.
