Hollywood Is About to Give Sleeping Beauty the Snow White Treatment

Sleeping Beauty, the 1959 animated Disney movie about a teenager who just doesn’t want to get out of bed for school unless one of her handsome classmates shimmies up to her window while her parents aren’t paying attention and necks with her, is soon going to have two live-action re-tellings. Not only is the Angelina Jolie hairdo movie Maleficent already filming, but now 21 Jump Street producer Neal Moritz is gearing up for his own Sleeping Beauty movie, which will be set in the modern world.

There’s another twist, of course, because there’s always a twist. Sleeping Beauty will not merely wake up when her gentleman caller kisses her in the Moritz version — she’ll subsequently stalk him, a plot point Boing Boing’s Jamie Frevele finds particularly stupid because turning Sleeping Beauty into a man-crazy stalker sort of defeats the purpose of the story’s kiss in the first place. Writes Frevele,

The whole point of the kiss that wakes the girl up is that it’s from her one true love. If she is only convincing herself that this guy is her one true love, then the kiss never woke her up in the first place. And if he’s her one true love, he isn’t going to go anywhere, so the stalking is unnecessary.

Hollywood, though, prefers to trim puzzle pieces around the edges so that they’ll fit rather than assemble puzzles correctly, hence this new stalker Sleeping Beauty and her reluctant beau.