Scouring the increasingly picked-over shelves of its family video library for another film to remake, Disney has gone the route of so many an uncool aunt babysitter who won’t just let you watch The Goonies, because it seems “too scary.” It’s pulled out Pete’s Dragon, the widely tolerated, 1977 live-action/animated film about an orphan, a cartoon dragon, and a town full of weird fishermen and aging comedians. Deadline reports that David Lowery of the Sundance hit Ain’t Them Bodies Saints (and no, not David Lowery of the band Cracker) will be rewarded for the buzz he created around his gritty drama by being assimilated into the Disney machine, then tasked with “reinventing” one of its old children’s movies in a presumably equally gritty, non-musical parlance. Beyond that we can probably assume that Pete's dragon will now be CGI, that Mickey Rooney will still insist on an audition, and that if you don’t want to watch Pete’s Dragon, you can just do your homework.
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