Sarah Polley In Talks To Direct Disney’s New Bambi Film | Movies

With a release date on the books for the live-action version of Moana thanks to Disney’s giant new announcement about shuffled movie arrivals, the Mouse House’s love for live-action versions of its animated canon remains unabated. It has been planning a new take on Bambi since at least 2020, and Deadline reports that Oscar-winning writer/director Sarah Polley is now in talks to handle the film.

Polley, who took home the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar at this year’s awards for Women Talking, might not seem like the first thought when it comes to a big, likely CG-heavy Disney fable, since her work has largely been in smaller-scale and documentary fare. But given what the likes of David Lowery have been able to do (he with Pete’s Dragon and this year’s Peter Pan & Wendy) where directors with blockbuster experience have fallen down (Robert Zemeckis and Pinocchio), we’re intrigued to see what Polley might do.

While Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Lindsey Beer were originally working on the script, A Beautiful Day In the Neighbourhood‘s’ Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster (who have their own Disney bona fides via Maleficent: Mistress Of Evil), have since written a draft. And it’ll apparently also feature music from country star Kacey Musgraves.

No words on when this one might start shooting (trigger, er warning for Bambi fans) given the current writers’ strike, but we’d expect it to find cinemas in the next couple of years.