Now That Guillermo Del Toro Is Rebooting ‘Pinocchio’ for Netflix, Have Him Do the Rest of the Disney Catalog

Yesterday’s news that Guillermo Del Toro will be partnering with Netflix for his next project, a stop-motion take on the Pinocchio story, is incredibly exciting. It pairs the streaming platform with the reigning Oscar winner for Best Picture and Best Director, and it puts Del Toro under the same roof, at the moment, with his good pal Alfonso Cuaron, whose Roma debuts on Netflix later this year. Specifically, though, it puts Del Toro onto a passion project for Pinocchio, a fictional character who goes back to an 1883 children’s novel but who was most widely popularized and made indelible in the cultural memory banks by the 1940 Disney animated classic Pinocchio. And more pertinently, it’s one of the classic animated properties that Disney has yet to remake as a live-action blockbuster. And if we can get Guillermo Del Toro to keep re-making Disney classics in his dark, gothic, in-the-shadow-of-creeping-fascism mold, how great would that be?

While Disney had seen success with the Glenn Close-starring live-action reboot of 101 Dalmatians and its sequel (102, baby!), the live-action remakes really caught fire with 2010’s Tim Burton re-imagining of Alice in Wonderland as a nightmare acid trip from which a child might never wake. The Angelina Jolie’s Maleficent made a bajillion dollars despite terrible reviews, which is how you knew it was very on. Since then, Cinderella, The Jungle Book, and Beauty and the Beast have all been remade as highly lucrative live-action blockbusters. Next up are Tim Burton’s Dumbo, Guy Ritchie’s Aladdin, and Jon Favreau’s The Lion King. They’ve all been licenses to print money, and there’s no reason the new ones won’t be as well. But they’re also wildly bankrupt, creatively, often serving as near shot-for-shot remakes of the animated originals (ahem, Beauty and the Beast), serving as mere brand extensions rather than films in their own right.

Say what you will about Guillermo Del Toro, but he will definitely bring his authorial voice to Pinocchio. The film will adapt the story and characters from the original book, so Disney-specific characters like Jiminy Cricket (the book has a talking cricket, though, and I’m already having a lot of fun imagining what Del Toro will do with it). But even in its Disney-fied form, Pinocchio was one of the scariest children’s tales Disney ever told. Pinocchio ends up in indentured servitude to the circus, and then gets sold along with a bunch of other delinquent boys into slavery on a place called Pleasure Island (um…) and then he nearly transforms into a donkey, and THEN he’s swallowed up by a giant whale. And now Guillermo Del Toro’s idea is like, “Yeah, that, but darker.”

Del Toro’s sensibilities have always trended towards the dark fairy tale anyway. Hell, his Best Picture winning The Shape of Water is a Cold War story about a fish-man who was saved by a mute girl in a tower (or did he save her?). Pan’s Labyrinth is very specifically a dark, frightening little-girl-lost tale. Both that film and GDT’s earlier horror film The Devil’s Backbone were set amid the backdrop of fascist Spain. So it’s no surprise that Del Toro is talking about setting his Pinocchio during the rise of Mussolini in 1930s Italy. As he said in a statement released yesterday, “In our story, Pinocchio is an innocent soul with an uncaring father who gets lost in a world he cannot comprehend. He embarks on an extraordinary journey that leaves him with a deep understanding of his father and the real world.” Definitively NOT the ol’ Disney cash-grab route.

There’s also a business advantage to Netflix letting Del Toro (or filmmakers darker, more auterist takes) go hog wild on the rest of the Disney catalog: it would be a great end run around Disney’s upcoming standalone streaming service, rumored to be called Disney Play. For that platform, Disney has been rounding up projects based on the three-pronged trident of intellectual properties: Disney animation/Pixar, the Lucasfilm/Star Wars universe, and the Marvel universe. Currently, they’ve got Jon Favreau’s Star Wars series The Mandalorian, proposed Scarlet Witch and Loki series for Marvel, and a Lady and the Tramp remake, featuring the voices of Justin Theroux and Tessa Thompson.

And while Disney is rounding up their properties under their own banner, Netflix’s deals with Marvel and Lucasfilm will only expire and fade away. Already, with the cancellations of Luke Cage and Iron Fist, the Marvel television foothold that Netflix had is eroding. But a Guillermo Del Toro-directed Pinocchio feels like the first step down a path that could differentiate Netflix from this new Disney behemoth. In Setpetmber, Disney CEO Bob Iger took a swipe at Netflix when boasting that Disney’s streaming service would “focus on quality rather than just volume.” Netflix could really show up the shallowness of that “quality” claim by countering Disney’s live-action cash cows with alternative takes by singular, more artistic filmmakers. Maybe, for a change, Netflix could be the voice of quality over quantity. A Guillermo Del Toro Gothic Fairy Tale Cinematic Universe does sound deeply cool.

Where to stream Pan's Labyrinth