Disney taps Bend It Like Beckham's Gurinder Chadha for an Indian "princess musical"

Gurinder Chadha—the prolific director best known for films like Bhaji On The Beach, Bend It Like Beckham, and 2019's Blinded By The Light—is teaming up with Disney, Deadline reports. Chadha has apparently been tapped by the Mouse Monolith to direct a new musical film, centered on a “dynamic princess’ from India’s history.

Chadha will produce and co-write the film, as she has most of her movies, with husband Paul Mayeda Berges. Details about the movie itself are pretty scant, but we’re reasonably sure—given Chadha’s track record—that the movie will be live-action, albeit for a pretty whimsical version of “live.” And, of course, there’s going to be singing.

Annoyingly, the Deadline report doesn’t list which princess Chadha and Berges’ film will be centered on, so it’s going to be difficult to speculate on what the plot of the movie might be. Going off of some of Chadha’s biggest hits (and also the general trend of Disney’s filmography), though, we might venture a guess that she’ll be an independent young woman coming of age in a culture where the older generation doesn’t understand her interests in kicking things or Bruce Springsteen, etc., only to demonstrate the value of the things she loves to the naysayers.

Although she came up primarily as a film writer/director—exploding onto the international scene with the massive success of Bend It Like Beckham, which smashed box office records when it arrived in 2002—Chadha has branched out into TV in recent years. Her recent projects include the historical drama Beecham House, which ran on ITV in the UK, and a contribution to the pandemic-era short film anthology series Homemade. (She and Berges also oversaw the stage musical version of Beckham back in 2015.) No word yet on when this new Disney film might release more details to the general public.