It seems that Disney’s 2014 Maleficent won’t be your daughter’s fairy tale.
The live action film, featuring Angelina Jolie in its title role, will delve into the history of its title character, exploring, according to Disney’s official release, “the origins of the evil fairy Maleficent and what led her to curse Princess Aurora in Disney’s animated classic Sleeping Beauty.” The film, although it only started filming June 19, 2012, stands as part of a rising trend for the Disney company, a concentrated campaign to market its classic fairy tale properties to a new, more adult audience.
Disney’s popular princess franchise has, in recent years, been criticized as appealing only to young girls. Sales demographics have bolstered that concern, and worries about the Disney princess brand being something that appeals to young girls and is then “grown out of” has even been cited as influencing the last-minute restructuring of Walt Disney World’s new Fantasyland expansion. Mothers introduce their little girls to the Disney princesses they remember, but many women’s lives have taken them beyond happily ever afters.
Fairy tales have, however, always been an integral part of the Disney image. For a company that exploded into the movie business with 1937′s Snow White and markets its theme parks as places where “dreams come true” and “anything is possible,” the abandonment of fairy tales itself seems utterly impossible.
So Disney, it seems, isn’t abandoning the fairy tale genre; it’s rebranding it for a more mature audience.
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