‘Lilo & Stitch’ Live-Action Remake to Be Directed by ‘Marcel the Shell with Shoes On’ Filmmaker

Dean Fleischer Camp, the filmmaker behind indie darling Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, is going Disney.

The filmmaker will direct a live-action take on Lilo & Stitch, the 2002 animated movie from Walt Disney Feature Animation. Chris Kekaniokalani Bright is in final negotiations to pen the script.

The move gets the project, which will be a tentpole feature for Disney+, back into the water. Stitch was first thrown into development back in 2018 with up-and-comer Mike Van Waes writing the screenplay. Dan Lin and Jonathan Eirich of Rideback are producing.

Rideback’s Ryan Halprin is executive producing.

The Hawaii-centric story told of the bond formed between a lonely human girl named Lilo and a dog-like alien named Stitch, who is engineered to be a force of destruction. Pursuing aliens, social workers and the theme of family bonds figure into the proceedings.

While not a massive success by modern box office standards, the well-regarded movie was a bright spot in a down period of Disney’s animation history and launched several direct-to-video sequels as well as television series.

Lilo is intended to be a live-action/CG hybrid, a form that Fleischer Camp has a proven facility with. Marcel is a heartwarming tale centered on a snail on an adventure into the human world. The movie is one of the most acclaimed of the year — it has a 99 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes — and A24 is using a platform release to build word of mouth. It has one of the highest per-screen averages and has made almost $1 million domestically on only 48 screens.

Bright is a Hawaii-born and -based scribe whose script Conviction made the Black List.

Hollywood Reporter Original Article