Let’s get down to business / To increase profit flow and maximize exploitation of beloved and lucrative properties / Will Disney give you more live-action retreads of beloved films / When you asked for new stuff?
They will, it turns out, as the company announced this week that 1998’s Mulan is the next film to be incorporated into its ongoing live-action movie recycling project. Mulan will join Alice In Wonderland, Maleficent, and the recently released Cinderella—not to mention the upcoming Beauty And The Beast and The Jungle Book—in being passed through the giant squeegee Disney uses to squeeze the last drop of nostalgia out of childhood classics and convert them into live-action, CGI-enhanced fairy tales.
Curiously, the new film—a retelling of the legend of Hua Mulan, a young Chinese woman who saved the Empire with the help of mythical beasts like dragons and the mysterious, giant-toothed creature known as Donny Osmond—is being produced by Chris Bender and J.C. Spink, whose previous credits include such heartwarming bedtime stories as We’re The Millers and American Pie. The announcement might mark a new direction for the producers’ careers, but it seems just as likely that they heard that the original film involved cross-dressing, pole-climbing, and Eddie Murphy, and assumed that they were supposed to be involved.