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 project for Disney+, back into the water. Stitch was first throwin into development back in 2018 with up-and-comer Mike Van Waes penning the script. 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 idea of the bond of a family 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 several television series.
Lilo is intended to be a live-action/CG hybrid, a form that Fleischer Camp has proven to have a mastery over. Marcel is a heartwarming tale centered on a snail on an adventure into the human world. The movie is one of the most acclaimed movies 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 average takes and on only 48 screens has made almost $1 million domestically.
Bright is a Hawaii-born and based scribe whose script Conviction made the Black List.