It’s sometimes hard to tell whether it’s a feature, or a bug, that the development process for many mainstream, big-budget movies of the modern era seems to resemble nothing so much as the twitchy, dementia-ridden ramblings of an aging millennial endlessly trapped in a labyrinth of their own childhood memories. “Bring back Lilo & Stitch!” “Get me another G.I. Joe movie!” And now, apparently, “We should have a live-action FernGully movie, made by the director of the Tom Hanks Mr. Rogers film!”
This is per Deadline, reporting that, yes, director Marielle Heller has apparently signed on for a live-action remake of 1992’s FernGully: The Last Rainforest, the eco-friendly animated feature about a rainforest logger who learns a valuable lesson about the environment after being shrunk down by a fairy. (Meanwhile, a certain subset of the film’s audience learned a whole other valuable lesson, about themselves, after being exposed to an in-his-prime Tim Curry voicing a seductive, singing pollution monster.) Although a relative non-entity at the box office, the film had a long tail on VHS, feeding children of the ’90s’ insatiable need for both Elton John songs and an animated Robin Williams doing schtick. (Famously, the film kicked off a feud between Williams and his old pals at Disney, too, after he asked them not to use his performance in Aladdin to counter-market the movie, and they failed to oblige.)
The remake is being developed at Amazon MGM, with Heller working from a script that she also wrote. (Similar to what she did with her last feature, 2024’s Nightbitch; she’s also currently working with her old pal Hanks on a new baseball movie, The Comebacker, which recently landed at Sony.) There’s no word yet on who’ll star in the FernGully remake; besides Williams and Curry, the original movie also starred Samantha Mathis and Jonathan Ward, and was directed by animation veteran Bill Kroyer.
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