Because the best stories are those that can be told again and again, preferably in competing versions and all at once, Beauty And The Beast is making inroads toward becoming the next Snow White in terms of fairy tales that producers believe in their heart can sustain multiple simultaneous updates, if only they clap loudly enough. Joining that growing chorus today is Christophe Gans, with the Silent Hill director now shopping his own version of the story with Vincent Cassel as the Beast and Lea Seydoux as the woman who loves him.
Did Gans have an appropriately grandiose statement to justify remaking a story that has already been told several times over, and is scheduled to be told several times more in the coming year? Indeed he did, thanks for asking: “Although I will keep to a form of storytelling of this timeless fairy tale that is in keeping with the same pace and characters as the original, I will surprise the audience by creating a completely new visual universe never experienced before and produce images of an unparalleled quality,” Gans said, before beginning a sharp, haughty French inhale of unparalleled depth that was, as of press time, still going.
Anyway, while Gans’ universe-creating images may have no known parallel, his idea, of course, has many: Not only has the last year seen the releases of Beastly and Disney’s Beauty And The Beast 3-D, the coming months promise Beauty And The Beast pilots at both ABC and The CW—and that’s in addition to the Beauty And The Beast storyline that’s about to be woven into ABC’s Once Upon A Time—plus a possible Guillermo del Toro-directed version starring Emma Watson. That is certainly a lot of beasts and their attendant beauties. For their sake, hopefully audiences can see past the superficial ugliness of so many remakes to the heart underneath—a heart that wants nothing more than to tell a tale as old as time, because those are the tales that don’t cost anything.