The Maleficent sequel has a new poster and title, and somehow it's not Maleficent 2: Heaven -Cent
Although you, personally, may have forgotten that Disney’s live-action reboot machine was steadily churning out a sequel to 2014's Angelina Jolie vehicle Maleficent, the company itself certainly hasn’t. That became abundantly clear today, when the entertainment giant handed out not only a new title, and not only a release date, but also a new poster for Maleficent: Mistress Of Evil, a deluge of content that in no way makes it look like someone at Disney marketing woke up this morning and thought, “Oh, shit we totally spaced on telling people about Maleficent 2!”
Anyway, while the first Maleficent hedged its bets a bit on whether Jolie’s formerly animated sorceress was actually all that bad—quickly revealing that the true villain was Sleeping Beauty’s dad, a paranoid, back-stabbing dick—this whole “Mistress Of Evil” thing certainly suggests that she’s finally going to be getting her true wickedness on. (Or maybe someone at Disney is just a big Elvira: Mistress Of The Dark fan, and wanted to make a very strange, poorly timed homage.) We guess it’s fine as far as titles go, even if we would have gone with something flashier. Maleficent 2: Welcome To The Maleficentury. Maleficent 2: Heaven -Cent. Maleficent 2: Male-50-Cent-Is-In-This-One. We could do this all day!*
Mistress Of Evil comes out on October 18, 2019, and will co-star Michelle Pfeiffer and Chiwetel Ejiofor, alongside a returning Elle Fanning and Jolie.
*Actually, we just tried for like five minutes, and we definitively can’t.