In what could be seen as a regression were it not for her presumably adult-sized salary, former child actress Emma Watson has signed on to play princess in a new Disney adaptation of Beauty And The Beast. Like the upcoming Cinderella, this version of the classic fairy tale will be live action, and The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn’s Bill Condon, a man who knows his way around a heavily CGI-accented fantasy romance, is attached to direct.
This version of Beauty And The Beast will compete with Guillermo del Toro’s Beauty And The Beast project, which is also supposed to star Watson as Belle. But that was over three years and approximately 46 Guillermo del Toro projects ago, so as long as del Toro doesn‘t knock over a pile of old scripts trying to locate his treatment for Pacific Rim 3 we assume that one’s dead for now. Production on Disney’s Emma Watson-starring Beauty And The Beast, however, begins later this year.