Disney has curtailed the development of the movie «Rapunzel: The Tangled Story» — another remake of the cartoon dedicated to the fairy-tale heroine of the Grimm brothers.
According to THRThe project was in «active» production with director Michael Gracie («The Greatest Showman») and screenwriter Jennifer Katelyn Robinson («Thor: LOTR»), but Disney put it on hold after the box office failure of «Snow White».
At this point, the film starring Rachel Zegler has earned $150 million at the box office, which is not enough for a budget that, according to some estimates, exceeded $350 million. In fact, to break even, the studio needs to earn at least $800 million from «Snow White», but this task does not seem too realistic, given that domestic ticket sales fell by more than 70% on the second weekend, and the fairy tale adaptation was beaten by a low-budget action movie starring Jason Statham.
From the very beginning of the production, «Snow White» was haunted by scandalous headlines — from casting criticism or the choice of visual effects for Zegler’s statements and her potential conflict with her co-star Gal Gadot, who played the evil stepmother. In the end, after the premiere grades have fallen to a catastrophic levelAnd now it’s hard to distinguish between a real reaction to the movie and the effects of review bombing (for example, on IMDb, where the rating of «Snow White» fell to 1.6 out of 10, added note on unusual activity).
It is not known how the fate of the remake «Rapunzel» — will develop further, either it will be canceled completely or some creative rethinking is planned. Be that as it may, it seems that Disney has begun to realize that something is going wrong with live-action versions of cartoons.
The studio started the course of relaunching famous titles back in the 2010s: some worked well, such as «The Lion King» or «Beauty and the Beast», and some, such as «Dumbo», no — but «Snow White», seemed to test the limits of this strategy. Now it is the turn of live version «Summer and Sticha»which will debut this year in May, as well as «Moana/Vayana», which was scheduled for July.
