Disney has quietly dumped its live-action-but-he's-still-a-sexy-fox Robin Hood plans

Raya And The Last Dragon director Carlos López Estrada has revealed that his Robin Hood revival plans are dead at Disney.

By William Hughes  |  March 6, 2026 | 8:58pm
1973's Robin Hood, Screenshot: YouTube
Film News Robin Hood
Disney has quietly dumped its live-action-but-he's-still-a-sexy-fox Robin Hood plans

In what we can only describe as catastrophic news for a certain vast sub-sector of DeviantArt technicians, plans for Disney’s 1973 animated film Robin Hood to be fed into the company’s ever-hungry live-action remake machine have apparently stalled. This is per Deadline, reporting on an AMA conducted on Reddit by director Carlos López Estrada, in which he described the project as “dead.”

Estrada—who came up as a music video director before helming 2018’s Blindspotting, and working for Disney on 2021’s Raya And The Last Dragon—was conducting the AMA to promote his upcoming film DED, as well as his production company, Antigravity Academy, and was pretty upfront with questioners about his stifled Robin Hood dreams. (He notes, among other things, that some of the shots in Blindspotting were deliberately patterned on ones from the 1973 animated feature.) As to the planned remake: “It’s dead sadly. I say sadly because I actually thought there was something really special (and original!) there. Some truly extraordinary music we had figured out for it.” (He later suggested that some ideas may end up filtering out of the abandoned project, noting, “I keep daydreaming about doing it independently with different characters.”)

None of this is entirely shocking, given that the Robin Hood project had been basically radio-silent since first being talked about all the way back in 2020. Although Disney’s live-action remakes show no sign of stopping any time soon, the company has seemed to lean into more of a recency bias mentality with which projects it chooses to adapt, especially after Snow White bombed last year. (Which is to say, more movies that today’s 40-year-olds might have seen in theaters when they were younger, and less old favorites pulled off the VHS shelves.) The Robin Hood remake was described as a hybrid of live-action and animation, which we’ll just have to go on imagining, in much the same manner as we have been for the last six somewhat fevered years.
 
We’ll also note that, as far as AMAs go, this one is a lot less PR-managed, and a lot more honest, than you often see lately: Estrada talks, for instance, about being part of the Disney machine, writing that “Disney was so special and so hard,” and that being the first non-white director at the studio “was in theory awesome but it came with some serious challenges too.” We’re not saying it’s necessarily incendiary stuff, but it does sound strikingly honest—including when Estrada expresses unhappiness at the course of a project that he eventually reveals to be 2023’s Wish, writing, “I was sad to leave, but wasn’t super on board with the direction it took.”
 
 

 
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