Director Adam Shankman Confesses That Disney Worked On Disenchanted 'Forever'
More than a decade after the release of Enchanted, Disney is following up the film with the sequel Disenchanted. The movie sees the return of Amy Adam as Giselle, the princess from Andalasia who decided to stay in New York and have a happily ever after with Patrick Dempsey’s Robert. 10 years later, however, Giselle is wishing she could have her fairytale life back.
Meanwhile, since it took this long for a sequel to be made, fans have long thought that it was never going to happen. As Disenchanted director Adam Shankman has revealed, however, Disney has been trying to get the film off the ground for years.
Amy Adams Is ‘Grateful’ That The Original Cast Members Returned For The Sequel
Just when it seemed a sequel was never happening, Adams, who also serves as a producer on Disenchanted, managed to get the cast back together to film in the middle of COVID. Aside from Dempsey, the returning cast also includes Idina Menzel and James Marsden.
“I was so grateful that we were able to get them all to find time in their schedules to come do this, especially during COVID,” the actress said.
“To get to bring such fresh energy was really magical. It was such a special time for me in my life, getting to play Giselle, and it’s nice to know that that was true for each of the people coming back as well, that they had a special relationship with this film and thought it was worthy of a sequel. It was just a real blessing.”
Meanwhile, Menzel also said it was “really fun” to return to her character, Nancy, after all these years, especially after what happened last time.
“So I find that to be a really fun little challenge, and my character especially is completely different because at the end of the first movie she jumps down a manhole with James Marsden,” she told Parade.
“She goes from being this New York chick to like living in [an] animated fairytale world. So it was fun to figure out how much of her New York self she kept with her, and how much she just kind of bought into being the queen of Andalasia…”
At the same time, Disenchanted also sees the introduction of Maya Rudolph as the film’s villain. And while she wasn’t involved in the original, the actress said she was a huge fan of the movie.
“Plugging into something that was already so exciting and so well-established was…kind of like a fantasy,” the actress said.
“You always wish for moments in life where you could play with these characters that you fell in love with, but I actually got invited to play with these characters that I fell in love with.”
Adam Shankman: Disney Has Been Working On An Enchanted Sequel ‘Forever’
Now, Disney may have never hinted that it was considering a sequel to Enchanted in the past. But as it turns out, the company had been thinking about it for some time. “They'd been working on it forever,” Shankman even revealed.
And while that may have been the case, Dempsey still wasn’t convinced that it was going to happen since nothing materialized in the past. “I didn’t think it was going to happen to be honest with you,” the actor admitted. “When they told me it was going, I had heard that before and I was convinced no, this isn’t going to go.”
But then, it seems the sequel finally got some traction when Adams stepped in. “No one knew that first movie better than her,” producer Barry Josephson told SFX’s Red Alert. “She was very, very encyclopedic and astute and creative about fairytales.”
That said, it also seems that Disney wasn’t really sure what direction the sequel should take. And that’s when they turned to Shankman and his pitch essentially ended up being the movie.
“The story of Giselle not accepting the world as it is, struggling with living in the real world, feeling distant from herself, and then ultimately realizing she's consigned herself to being the stepmother, which is for Giselle, a very bad thing, was always the pitch,” he explained.
“That was always how we got her there. Also, I believe this story of turning the whole world into a fairytale, that was something that I'd pitched, too. I was like, ‘She's not a fish out of water in the world anymore, so you got to make everybody else the fish out of water.’” As it turns out, the new story came with more singing too.
It also seems that Adams helped in developing the script. “She came up with some brilliant concepts along the way that led us to a screenplay that when the studio read it, they were very engaged with,” Josephson shared.
And in case anyone is wondering why Gisele and Robert didn’t split up or divorce in the sequel, Shankman’s answer is simple. “Nobody needs to see that.”
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