Disney has gone full blown with its live action films, having announced five more of such movies until the year 2019. However, while the media giant has been successful in those sorts of adaptations, it hasn't explored much of one aspect that fans have come to love from Disney classics – the music.
Jon Favreau's The Jungle Book had hints of a musical, but it wasn't fully embraced. That will soon change with next year's live-action adaptation of Beauty and the Beast.
In an interview with Cinema Blend, actor Josh Gad, who will play LeFou in the highly anticipated film, explained why Beauty and the Beast needed to be a musical.
Apparently, it was essential to have the movie be of quality since the songs from the popular animated version are more known to fans, and those fans would definitely want to hear them.
Cinderellais an exceptional animated movie, but the songs, other than like ‘Bippity Boppity Boo,' and the song that Cinderella herself sings, because it came out so long ago, people don't have the same familiarity with that.
Jungle Book, a little bit closer to resonance, and so I think that they layered some of those songs in there.
Beauty and the Beast, you'd better damn well believe that people know those songs. They expect to hear those songs, and they have dreamed of seeing those songs come to life. I know I have for 20+ years. So, I think it's the burden of expectation is there, that the music will be a part of it.
Beauty and the Beast is not only one of Disney's most popular animated films, but it also won the Oscar for best picture. Obviously, one of the reasons for its popularity and acclamations is the music. It's no wonder that at less than 30 years old, Disney has decided to give it some live action treatment.
It would certainly be interesting to see a movie of such scale being a musical, and Josh Gad believes it would be something audiences would want to see:
I think that [what] the creative team has so brilliantly done is they've embraced it so fully that the scale and scope of those numbers is unlike anything modern Hollywood really gets a chance to do anymore. You're going to see songs come to life in Technicolor magic, in a way that I think like big studio films, once upon a time, used to do, but have sort of not done for a long period of time and I think it's going to be really amazing thing for audiences to see again.
Beauty and the Beast hits theaters on March 17, 2017.
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