Mother Gothel, the villain of Disney’s well-loved animated feature Tangled, is completely obsessed with aging—to the point that she gets up to some pretty heinous princess gaslighting and tower-based security systems to keep herself in delicious, youth-restoring girl hair. And, you know what? We can kind of relate. Because the reminder that we’re now all old enough that Scarlett Johansson is in talks to play the “Evil sometimes-crone” part in a live-action remake of the 2010 movie is making us want to reach for the enchanted scissors, too.
This is per Deadline, which reports that Disney is now getting back on the live-action Tangled train, having briefly gotten spooked by the absolutely tepid response that greeted this year’s Snow White remake. (Of course, it’s worth noting that the original Tangled is quite a bit more modern, funny, and complex than the original Snow White, which might help the thing land on any axis besides pure animation nerd nostalgia.) That apparently includes entering into talks with Johansson—who seems to be fully over that whole “getting very litigious about Black Widow” phase—to play Gothel, who’s one of the more interesting Disney villains in recent memory, a supposedly doting mother who steadily reveals that her “protectiveness” for her “daughter,” Rapunzel, is really just rampant narcissism. (The character was played by two-time Tony winner Donna Murphy in the original film.)
After all, it’s not like audiences have been rejecting the live-action remake trend outright; Lilo And Stitch squeezed a billion dollars out of a 23-year-old animated film this year, while Dreamworks got in on the self-mining fun with a How To Train Your Dragon remake based on a film that came out the same year as Tangled. We do find it a little weird that these remakes of more modern films don’t tap the creatives who are still hanging around Hollywood to work on them, though, notably This Is Us‘ Dan Fogelman, who wrote the original Tangled. (Screenwriting duties on the remake will instead by handled by I Know What You Did Last Summer remake writer-director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, while the movie is being directed by Michael Gracey.)
