Disney Plans ‘Bambi’ Live-Action Remake
At this point, we should probably just assume that every Disney animated classic will be remade in live-action at some point. Disney has already made The Lion King, Aladdin, The Jungle Book, Beauty and the Beast, Lady and the Tramp, Cinderella, Dumbo, Alice in Wonderland, and more — with Mulan and Cruella on the way in the next months and years.
Nearly all these films have been huge hits. So Disney would be silly not to keep going. The Hollywood Reporter claims their next target for a live-action remake is one of the company’s most beloved titles: The 1942 classic Bambi. Rather than looking to cast an extremely adorable deer, the movie will be made in the style of The Lion King, with extremely convincing looking CGI animals:
Insiders say the studio views Bambi as a type of companion piece to its remakes The Jungle Book and The Lion King, which were not live-action per se but certainly made to look that way. The two, both hits (Lion King generated $1.65 billion when it was released last year), were made using envelope-pushing CG technology to create ground-breaking photo-realistic and immersive worlds of nature. The studio is cognizant that Bambi is less epic in scope and story and is not aiming to shoehorn a larger narrative onto the classic tale.
THR says Disney has tapped Geneva Robertson-Dworet (Captain Marvel) to develop the screenplay for Bambi 2.0. (Not Bambi II — they already made that in 2006.)
I’ve enjoyed some of Disney’s remakes, but mostly the ones with human characters, and therefore human actors. The ones like The Lion King that just remake the original with CGI and much slower pacing have left me pretty cold. That makes me a little worried about Bambi. Regardless, at this rate, we’re not too far off from a live-action remake of Oliver & Company — or maybe a future where Disney starts turning their live-action remakes into CGI animated remakes of the live-action remakes.
Gallery — The Best Disney Villains in History: