Tony-winning M. Butterfly playwright David Henry Hwang has been set by Disney to write Hunchback, a live action musical adaptation of the Victor Hugo novel. Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz will write the music. Mandeville is producing along with Josh Gad. I had heard that Gad, a star of the Mandeville-produced blockbuster Beauty and the Beast, might play the lead character, but insiders at the studio said no casting is solid at this point.The new film will pull from the ’96 animated film and the Hugo novel but not the stage production that Schwartz and Menken collaborated on for the stage in Europe. David Hoberman, who runs Mandeville with Todd Lieberman, has been fixated on a live action Hunchback for over 30 years going back to when he was Disney film president. An early attempt led to the animated film and another resulted in a limited TV series on ABC. Now it has come back around as a feature film, and while it is early and not on the Disney release calendar, Hunchback has some of the most storied players from the stage and musical realms.
I'd rather see another adaptation of the novel by someone other than Disney instead of a remake of the Disney version of that story that wasn't even a faithful adaptation to begin with.
I'd rather see another adaptation of the novel by someone other than Disney instead of a remake of the Disney version of that story that wasn't even a faithful adaptation to begin with.
Good thing Netflix has one spearheaded by Elba (who's also directing)...except that it's modern day set. Hence mentioning Jungle Book in the OP
Yes, faithful like that. I read those books. I know what most people would call a 'faithful' adaptation, namely following every stupid detail of the plot beat for beat. That's not what I'm coming to see. Keeping all the plot points does not a good adaptation make if it's not engaging or if it does not keep the essence of the source material intact. GOT, like ASOIAF, is about death, power and all those interesting things, hence why it's a good adaptation in my mind: it tackles the same ideas and comes to the same conclusions as the source material about those ideas whilst wildly diverging on occasion in terms of plot and characters.
The Disney Hunchback does not make for a faithful adaptation, mainly because the ending misunderstands the meaning behind the ending of the book and in general, the book is more about the architectural structure that survives all these short human lives that come and go. The Disney animated feature is a good movie on its own if you separate it from the source material but as an adaptation it primarily fails also due to the huge and messy tonal shifts that the gargoyles create. I would not want to see this repeated in a live-action remake noone except studio execs asked for. The Disney animated feature does not know what it wants to be, whereas GOT knows exactly what it is and what it needs to do.
