It seems that we’ve been hearing about Disney’s live-action Maleficent for an eternity, and now that it's in motion, you’ll probably hear a lot more about this loose reinterpretation of Sleeping Beauty starring Angelina Jolie as the titular villain. The Mouse House has already set a release date of March 14, 2014.
That’s two years away, but Disney has big aspirations for the twisted fairy tale. In fact, HitFix’s Drew McWeeny believes Disney “really, really, really, really want[s] this to be as big as Alice in Wonderland.” That's no small feat considering "Alice," which opened in early March 2010, took in more than a billion dollars worldwide.
This film will examine Maleficent’s origins, including how she came to be so evil and why she bothered cursing Aurora in the first place. This slightly differs from the notion that this would simply be “Beauty” told from Maleficent’s point of view. Elle Fanning is negotiating to play Princess Aurora, the princess who was the protagonist in the 1959 fairy tale.
In the early development stages, Tim Burton was attached to direct Maleficent, but in January, Oscar-winning art director Robert Stromberg (Alice in Wonderland, Avatar) took the job, his first time directing a feature film.
