Disney has recently made it a habit of going back over almost every one of its animated films and remaking them in live-action settings. They have been big hits just about across the board, especially with The Lion King, Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast, which were major blockbusters. The trend now continues with a remake for 1970’s The Aristocats reportedly on the way.
The Disney animated classic about a Paris-set family of prim and proper kitties who get caught in the middle of a family debacle when they become first in line to inherit their human family’s fortune is now among Disney’s upcoming live-action remakes. Per a report by Deadline, a new Aristocats movie is in early development with two screenwriters on board to pen the script.
Will Gluck, who notably wrote the recent Peter Rabbit movies, as well as Easy A, will write the remake alongside Keith Bunin, who recently worked with Pixar with his original story for Onward. The pair of writers are certainly apt with family entertainment, and they’ll be behind revitalizing the beloved cat tale.
In terms of the fine-tune details, it’s still too early for The Aristocats. It hasn’t been reported on whether the movie will be sent straight to streaming like 2019’s The Lady and the Tramp was or go to theaters. Since the launch of Disney+, the studio has opted for a mix of both types of releases, notably with the biggest Pixar movies regularly going straight to streaming.
The report does share that Disney would be creating CGI-animated cats for The Aristocats, similar to The Lady and the Tramp. So we can expect it to have a realistic Parisian setting and live-action actors alongside photo-realistic cats created by the cutting-edge studio. For The Lady and the Tramp, the studio used real dogs from shelters to act in select scenes, and then used CGI animation for other scenes, including (of course) when the dogs moved their mouths to speak.
Considering it’s been over 50 years since The Aristocats came out, there will be plenty of updates Disney can bring to the remake. The original made headlines in 2020 when Disney decided to add content warnings on some of its old movies, including as The Aristocats, for its insensitive depictions in animation. The Aristocats specifically includes a hurtful caricature of East Asian people in one particular scene.
Along with The Aristocats being in development at Disney, some remakes of this kind are arriving sooner. The next one expected to come out sometime this year on Disney+ is Peter Pan & Wendy, starring Jude Law as Captain Hook and Yara Shahidi as Tinker Bell. Perhaps the most highly-anticipated live-action Disney movie coming up, though, is The Little Mermaid, which will reimagine the beloved musical for live-action in summer 2023.