Jun 3, 2015

Disney Extends "Bald Mountain Night" to Feature Film

It was inevitable: The memorably phantasmagoric finale of Fantasia is getting its own live-action spinoff.

Dracula Untold and The Last Witch Hunter screenwriters Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless are the lucky duo who landed the project, which is still in early development at Disney, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Sazama and Sharpless will also executive produce the reboot which, while it is live-action, will almost certainly lean heavily on CGI to recreate the original animated segment's nightmarish spirit and relentless velocity, shepherded to the screen under the guidance of master animator Vladimir “Bill” Tytla.

There's no indication yet whether Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky's stirring 1867 score of the same name, which was never performed during his lifetime, will make the cut of the new iteration of Fantasia's “Night on Bald Mountain.” But what is quite clear is that Disney is pretty busy rebooting more or less any existing property in its library with top-shelf CGI for the millennial set who might have a hard time spotting even Fantasia 2000 in a lineup.

Most recently it was announced that Reese Witherspoon is set to star in a live-action Tinker Bell film. Live-action iterations of Beauty and the Beast and The Jungle Book are also on the way.

But “Night on Bald Mountain” is a less accessible masterpiece, compared to those mainstream classics, although its midnight summoning of evil spirits and restless souls, at the hands of the devil Chernobog, fits this dystopian millennium like a glove. It will be interesting to watch Sharpless and Sazama's version come to life in an entirely new form, for an audience 75 years removed from its source material.