The Next Franchise Disney Plans To Ruin With A Live-Action Version Is Winnie The Pooh

Winnie The Pooh Receives A Star On Hollywood Walk of FameDisney‘s list of planned live-action remakes of their classic animated films has been growing by the week, to the dismay of purists everywhere (and the glee of Disney nerds). First we had Cinderella, then Beauty and the Beast was announced, and now Dumbo, Mulan, and The Jungle Book are all on tap. And now? Winnie the Pooh.

According to io9, Alex Ross Perry is on deck to write and direct the film. The plotline of the movie is apparently intended to revolve around Christopher Robin’s return to the Hundred Acre Wood as a grown man. Sounds totally not depressing at all! This isn’t anything that would be based on one of the original stories by A.A. Milne; it seems a little closer to taking a page from the imaginary Spaceballs sequel–Winnie the Pooh 2: The Search for More Money. A search that it’ll probably succeed in, as long as it doesn’t go along with the io9 staff’s speculation about which animal character should be the first to maul poor Christopher Robin.

Pooh-Bear and his companions in the Hundred Acre Wood wouldn’t have been my first choice for a Disney live-action update. That distinction would probably go to The Black Cauldron, because if you’re going to remake an existing film, you might as well do it to try to make something good out of an eye-bleedingly-bad movie, and do the original novel some justice at last. Winnie the Pooh is also not my last choice, though, which would almost certainly have to go to the “Night on Bald Mountain” death-and-demons sequence from Fantasia, which scares the bejeezus out of kids just fine in cartoon form without any help from being filmed with painstaking realism. I’m unconvinced that a live-action version of the tubby little cubby all stuffed with fluff won’t have similarly nightmare-inducing, childhood-destroying properties.

At least these live-action remakes are better than the painful direct-to-video sequels Disney has been in the habit of producing (do yourself a favor and take a hammer to any copies of Hunchback of Notre Dame II that cross your path). What A-list actors and actresses do you want to see providing the voices of Pooh, Piglet, Rabbit, and Owl? Leave your ideal fan-cast in the comments. Or, alternatively, take the fact that today is Friday as permission to go have a drink to forget that this is a thing that’s happening. And then read your kids a few chapters from The House On Pooh Corner to salvage some happy childhood memories out of this wreck.

(Image: Michael Buckner / Staff / Getty)

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