Disney

Life is like a hurricane, with all these reboots and revivals coming at us. It's a duck-blur. But today on Twitter, Disney got everyone's attention by releasing the first promotional image from the new incarnation of Ducktales, which arrives on Disney XD in 2017. The image was first tweeted from the Twitter account of Disney D23, the official Disney fan club, and was then shared by other official Disney sources.

Along the western edge of Disneyland, rises a craggy peak of mossy cliffs, tangled tree roots, and thorny briar patches. This attraction — part animatronic carnival, part kid-friendly log flume — is known as Splash Mountain, and thanks to the technical wizards at Walt Disney Imagineering, it really looks like an authentic summit. But of course, it’s not; it was built in the late 1980s at a reported cost of some $75 million. It’s a very fun ride — and possibly the strangest in the entire Disney empire, since it’s essentially a giant $75 million monument to a movie that Disney has kept out of circulation for more than 30 years.

In the beginning of Disney’s ‘Zootopia,’ Judy Hopper, a young determined bunny with big aspirations, is told by her parents that complacency is better than chasing your dreams. “You know why your mom and I ended up so happy?” her small town carrot farmer dad asks. “We gave up on our dreams and settled!” At first ‘Zootopia’ might seem like Disney once again banging their follow-your-dreams and never-give-up drum, but it quickly overcomes that outdated adage. Instead, Judy’s story of perseverance becomes the entry point for a larger movie about the tough realizations that come with leaving a bubble of blind comfort, and one that uses he animal kingdom to comment on prejudice, race relations and police brutality.

Deadpool demolished box office records, quickly becoming the biggest X-Men franchise film of all time and the highest-grossing R-rated film. It certainly wasn’t the first successful R-rated action comedy, but in terms of superhero films, Deadpool made a pretty major splash — which has fans wondering if we’ll see more comic book adaptations take the restricted rating route. While Warner Bros. appears to be open to the possibilities, there’s one studio that definitely won’t be taking a similar tack anytime soon…or ever.

As the story goes, corrupt government officials intentionally introduced a dangerous drug into marginalized minority communities resulting in increased power for politicians and law enforcement through the manipulated fear of the middle class. This narrative has been the subject of a number of popular conspiracy theories over the years concerning the CIA’s alleged involvement in the crack cocaine epidemic among the African American community in the mid-80s. It’s also the plot of the 55th Disney animated movie starring a group of cute, talking animals.

On February 21, ABC will broadcast a new special titled The Wonderful World of Disney: Disneyland 60, a commemoration of the Anaheim amusement park’s sixtieth anniversary and Star Wars devotees just got a reason to tune in that can’t be ignored.

Disney announced a slate of 19 upcoming films with release dates through 2020. In addition to Marvel’s Ant-Man 2, three untitled Marvel movies and the release date for The Incredibles 2, Disney also revealed dates for four new live-action fairy tales. According to Variety, the untitled fairy tales will be released on December 22, 2017, November 2, 2018, March 29, 2019 and November 8, 2019. But what could these untitled movies be?

So far, we only know some basic info about Disney’s next animated musical, Moana — Dwayne Johnson joined the voice cast months ago, and the studio offered a few details during D23, but nothing very substantial, like who exactly is playing the title role of the next Disney princess? A new feature introduces you to Auli’i Cravalho, a young Hawaiian girl who beat out hundreds of hopefuls in Disney’s search for the voice of Moana.

If you’re a fan of Disney baddies like cigar-smoking Bill Sykes from Oliver & Company (and really, who isn’t a fan of Bill Sykes from Oliver & Company?), this news is relevant to your tobacco-stained interests: The Walt Disney Company has banned all depictions of smoking from all of its films from all of its child-oriented labels (including Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm) rated G through PG-13. Via a press release:

If you keep your eyes peeled during Tangled you can catch a glimpse of some other Disney classics. In the background, there are nods to Pinocchio, The Little Mermaid, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast and Frozen, plus other references from classic Disney fairy tales. This is just one of the facts packed into the latest episode of You Think You Know Movies, which lets it hair down with Tangled!

Acquiring Lucasfilm and Marvel were just two minor steps in Disney’s grand plan to eventually own everything you love and control your life as Entertainment Overlord Supreme of the Planet Earth. But to be fair, they are a benevolent god. A caring god. A god that wants to make its riches available to you, should you want to indulge yourself. So prepare thyself: TV channels based entire on Marvel and Star Wars content may be coming.

It was inevitable: Disney is making a live action Winnie the Pooh movie because of course Disney would make a live action Winnie the Pooh movie. The studio’s tactic of bringing their animated properties into the live action realm has already paid off with Alice in Wonderland, Maleficent and Cinderella, so why not pay another visit to the Hundred Acre Wood and let a live action Christopher Robin hang out with a CGI Piglet?

The news out of Disney’s shareholder meeting keeps on coming. This one isn’t much of a surprise: Disney is making Frozen 2. In a related story, the sky is blue and water is wet (until a princess with freezing powers comes along and turns it into ice).

The name “Disney” brings to mind images of fair princesses, charming princes, magical fairy tales, and simple happily ever afters. In recent years, though, Disney has begun rethinking their classic properties, and releasing more thematically complex versions of their famous films. Sleeping Beauty became Maleficent, which turned a wicked witch into a sympathetic anti-hero; a whole mess of fairy tales turned into Into the Woods, where happily ever after preceded a whole bunch of death and tragedy. The ranks of Disney Princesses grew to include women like Merida, the bow-slinging heroine of Brave, and Anna and Else from Frozen, who rescued each other from an prince, rather than the other way around. Every value and concept that Disney had established and reinforced through decades of repetition was seemingly up for reconsideration and revision.

With their new Cinderella just days away, Disney is continuing its streak of turning its animated classics into live-action features with the news, via the Wall Street Journal, that Dumbo is ready to make the transition from animated elephant to ... well, still-animated elephant surrounded by live-action actors. If that idea doesn’t get your ears flapping, maybe this will: the Journal says Tim Burton will be the man who’ll direct the new Dumbo.

You love ‘Frozen’, but you've already seen the movie and listened to the soundtrack an infinite amount of times. What to do? Well, just keep counting down the days until March 13, when an all-new ‘Frozen’ adventure—‘Frozen Fever’—opens in theaters with Disney's ‘Cinderella’.