Disney pauses live-action “Tangled” remake in wake of “Snow White” underperforming at the box office

Disney's live-action Tangled movie may not see the light after all.

The planned remake of the studio's 2010 animated Rapunzel musical is now paused following a period of active development, Entertainment Weekly has learned. The Hollywood Reporter first reported the news.

The project had Michael Gracey (The Greatest Showman, Better Man) attached to direct, while Jennifer Kaytin Robinson (Do Revenge, Thor: Love and Thunder) had been hired to write the screenplay. Now the film's future is uncertain, as it could undergo a creative overhaul if it ever proceeds.

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The original Tangled starred Mandy Moore as the golden-haired princess of fairy-tale lore and Zachary Levi as the dashing rogue Flynn Rider. The movie marked Disney's first attempt at updating its tried-and-true princess musical formula with 3D computer animation and was a solid hit, making just under $600 million at the global box office. Following a fairly sluggish aughts, the movie ushered in a highly successful run of 2010s computer-animated films for the Mouse House that included massive hits like Zootopia and the Frozen movies.

News of the live-action Tangled stalling comes in the wake of Disney's latest live-action update to an animated classic, Snow White, failing to ignite the box office in its first two weeks of release. The film bore a reported $270 million budget — the highest of any of the studio's live-action remakes, in part due to delays from the 2023 writers' and actors' strikes. So far the movie has earned around $145 million at the global box office, with just under $70 million in domestic ticket sales.

Looking back a few months further, Mufasa: The Lion King opened to just $35 million domestically in December — $7 million less than Snow White's $42 million stateside opening. But Mufasa still managed to cross the $700 million mark worldwide, so it's not impossible that Snow White could end its run with a much higher total than its early performance has suggested, though it faces competition from fellow family film A Minecraft Movie this weekend.

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Audience demand for live-action remakes of beloved animated films will face several more tests in the coming months, as Disney's Lilo & Stitch remake will hit theaters over Memorial Day weekend and Universal's live-action reimagining of DreamWorks' How to Train Your Dragon will bow in June. And next year Disney is set to unveil a live-action Moana, with Dwayne Johnson reprising the role of Maui.

All three of those upcoming projects share a quality with Tangled that Snow White lacks: recent source material. The original Lilo & Stitch came out in 2002, while Tangled and How to Train Your Dragon both arrived in 2010, and the first animated Moana hit theaters in 2016 (followed by an animated sequel last November). Snow White, on the other hand, is an update to Disney's oldest-ever animated feature, which hit cinemas 88 years ago.

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Disney's best-performing remakes — 2019's The Lion King, 2017's Beauty and the Beast, and 2019's Aladdin, which each made more than $1 billion globally — all adapted mega-popular Disney movies from the studio's lucrative Renaissance period in the 1990s. On the other hand, adaptations of Disney's oldest movies — such as 2019's Dumbo and 2010's The Sorcerer's Apprentice, which adapted the most famous segment from 1940's Fantasia — have been among the studio's lowest-performing remakes (about $350 million for Dumbo and $215 million for Sorcerer's Apprentice).

It's possible that Snow White's performance merely reaffirms contemporary audiences' lack of interest in revisiting Disney's older animated films rather than signifying burnout on all live-action remakes. So if you've got a dream to see Tangled play out again in live action, keep paying attention to how Stitch, HTTYD, and Moana fare.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly