Walt Disney Pictures has seen a renaissance in its output of animated adaptations of classic fairytales (once the studio’s bread and butter) in recent years thanks to the popularity of hits like Tangled and Frozen, and expects similarly solid returns out of the Polynesian legend-inspired Moana and the Jack & The Beanstalk retelling Gigantic in the near future. The studio has also focused its attention on giving its older animated classics new life as big-budget live-action remakes, most recently with director Jon Favreau’s box office success, The Jungle Book.
There are at least 15 such live-action remakes are currently known to be planned by Disney, most of them based on the studio’s films that have now achieved “classic” status. However, based on a quote by a star of the Disney-owned Marvel Cinematic Universe, a surprising title could be among the live-action remakes currently in the pipeline.
One of the noteworthy entertainment stories of 2015 was original Avengers helmer Joss Whedon not only declining to make more Marvel films (at least not in the immediate future) but voicing what at the time sounded like a surprising amount of discontent with certain aspects of the production on Avengers: Age of Ultron – a sign that things were not well between the filmmaker and the Disney-owned Marvel Studios. Whedon indicated that his views on that period have softened during a recent Tribeca Film Festival sit down with Avengers star Mark Ruffalo, where the Hulk actor indicated that at the time Whedon had staunchly refused his own pleas for him to stay with the franchise. Said Ruffalo (per Deadline):
“I begged him to do Avengers 3 and 4, Hulk 3, Thor 3 and Quasimodo, and he said, I’ll never do it again.”
That last name/title stands out from the rest, and not simply because it’s the only one that’s not the name of an established (or planned) Marvel franchise. While there is, in fact, a Marvel Universe character named “Quasimodo” (a living-computer henchman of The Mad Thinker with a robot body and malformed human-like face whose full name was “Quasi-Motivational Destruct Organism”) the name originally belongs to the eponymous character of Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”. Of particular (potential) interest is that Hugo’s book was previously adapted by Disney into an animated film in 1996.
