If any money from Disney goes into Paris Hilton's pocket I will be p!$$ed

Hmmm.. I'm interested in what Oren/Cook will eventually find as the answer to the question what a Disney movie truly is.. I believe there is more room for PG-13 material, it's still family friendly so why not go for it?

"Snow and the Seven" sound.. little strange, but I'll give it a try. "Snow White and the Seven Droids," god, sounds corny, but if they had produced a decent film with a strong story, why not! Would have been a sci-fi'ey twist!

I played the game "Prince of Persia: Sands of Time" and, if memory serves, the plot is that the Prince (never named) has just returned from his first overseas battle and shares the spoils with his father, the sultan, in their palace. The Prince keeps a dagger for himself and the Vizier (a Jafar rip-off) shows off the hourglass containing the Sands of Time and a captured princess. The Vizier then tells the Prince to "unlock" the hourglass with the aforementioned "Dagger of Time," while the POW princess tries to stop him, knowing it's trouble. The Prince unlocks the Sands, chaos ensues, everybody dissappears save the Prince, the POW and Jafar, now a magically-enpowered megalomaniac (hmm...familiar?). The big selling point of the game was the fact that, as the Prince adventured, you found some of the Sand that would charge up your Dagger, allowing for time-based bonuses (Reverse a crumbling bridge back to normal, Fast Forward yourself past the stabbing walls, Pause falling rocks so you could platform-jump over them, etc.) That, and it's franchise ready with three games already made in the series, "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time," "Prince of Persia: Warrior Within," and "Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones". The plots of the other two, in a sentence or less is that, in WW, you go back in time to stop the Sands of Time from being created in the first place (and you become much darker, almost a goth-Persian), and in TTT, your temporal displacement adventures have messed up the present so much, that the dark side you and the light side have to work together to hopefully stabilize things. Yep, standard family-action fare...<yawn>. I'm a'go watch Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children again.

Isn't it a bit ironic that Disney even needs to figure out what a Disney movie is? Isn't it also ironic that, in a way, it takes Walden Media to show them? "Bridge to Terabithia" is very much a traditional Disney movie, maybe a little more edgy than a Hayley Mills film, but with all the elements -- emotion, friendship, magic, imagination, hope -- that made so many Disney classics so memorable.

Let's just hope they don't ask the "brand" managers.

This news fills me with so many questions:

Am I missing something here ? Doesn't George Lopez already work for Disney? Wouldn't he be considered long before Carlos - I'm like Aladdin, but I steal jokes instead of food - Mencia? Otherwise, even a bad talking dog movie is good for $50 mill, as long as they don't release it during the summer.

An all-star martial arts movie with no violence ? ok, who does that please? Probably not the martial arts fans. Jackie Chan has had the most success crossing over to US audiences, but after a while, he does hit people. Someone in Disney marketing needs to attempt to take a woman on a date to a martial arts movie - you can tell them Jackie Chan is really funny, you can tell them it's like watching a really fast ballet, you can tell them it's based on Snow White - they ain't going. No need to even suggest a movie with Jet Li.    Mr Yuen, the director, staged some pretty violent scenes in Matrix and Kill Bill, but there will be no violence in Disney movies, so what is he to do?  And isn't Wonderboys the movie they released, nobody came, and they released it again hoping for Oscar nominations, then it went away for good? Speaking of wondering, when you make the "Ocean's 11 of martial arts movies", who is the martial arts equivalent of Scott Cann ?

Prince of Persia - like Lassetter,  Bruckheimer has made plenty o' cash for the Disney Co, so he gets as close as you can get to a free pass in the movie world. I always enjoy this movie when I see it every other week on TNT - they call it "The Mummy." I don't think they needed to spend the money on the POP title to appeal to the videogamers. If they make a cool adventure film, word will quickly spread through the same target market before the movie is released, but hey, Bruckheimer earned his pass to spend the $ however he wants.

My biggest question is how does someone say with a straight face that they've spent 7 months figuring out that the goal is to make movies with appropriate dialogue, lots of action, and G rated romance?

Wow, "South of the Border" sounds amazing. As in horrible.

I'm very dubious about POP. Even if they can Disney-fy it, the fact is it'sstill based on a videogame and they are notoriously difficiult things to adapt because as it sands there has NEVER been a decent game to film adaptation.

I do think PoP has a shot at being a great Disney action movie a la Pirates. The PoP games are a little violent, but what makes "Sands of Time" stand out from its 2 sequels is its Arabian Nights-esque fairy tale charm, don't you think so, Cecilbdemented? The way the Prince narrates the story, accent and all, he makes it sound like a timeless tale, intimate in character, yet grand in its adventure. I'm cautiously excited! I love this game!

"South of the Border" still sounds a lot like "Cars" and "American Dog" to me.... but with more ethical issues than I can count.  [I apologize: after several years of working in a holistic petcare store, I have come to abhore anything that relates to treating one's dog as an accessory.  But I digress...]

Actually, I'm rather excited about "Snow and the Seven" - at least, the prospect gave me a nice laugh... in a good way.  I'm reminded of how Gail Carson Levine took the basic "Cinnerella" story and adapted in a fun, spirited way to "Ella Enchanted", [the book, mind you].  Hopefully, "Snow and Seven" will be of a similar sort. [that, and my fianceé is giggling in excitement over all of the great martial artists who could potentially star in the film.  He's hoping for Tony Jaa, or, since he already has a Disney contract, Yun-Fat Chow.

Oh, and I think if Disney were to do a video game.... Kingdom Hearts would be a prime candidate.  It's such a pity they haven't done more with it!

Except for Prince of Persia, every one of those movies sound horrible. Egad. I  hope a lot of this article is hearsay and not fact.

"An all-star martial arts movie with no violence?"

They mean "no violence" in the way Pirates 1 and 2 had "no violence".  Meaning action (violence with little or no blood).

Martial arts have done very well with that PG-13 level of violence, specifically the Jackie Chan stuff, arty stuff like Crouching Tiger, and comedies like Shaolin Soccer.  It's definitely possible to do a martial arts film that's not overly violent, appropriate for "family" audience (at least in the same way as Pirates) and even a date movie.  Chicks loved Crouching Tiger, and stuff like some of the Jackie Chan movies has crossed over ages and genders.

And Prince of Persia actually seems like a game that could be turned into a decent movie, they just need to use it as a source of elements like characters, setting, magical stuff, instead of trying to flesh out the game plot (kinda like Pirates did with the ride).

With so many movies pushing video game tie-ins as of late, why are they basing Prince of Persia on an old video game?  I'm surprised they are not giving a completely new story line and having a video game come out to tie into the movies release.

Why base a movie on an old amusement park ride?

Rotel, they are basing it on the more recent Prince of Persia games, not the old 1980s ones. Besides, it sounds like they really are just using story/character elements of the game rather than rehashing the exact same plot, so there's room for creativity.

Eh, to me, doing PoP is, in essence, an live-action Aladdin. Greenlighting that picture is equivalent to Wlat Disney Pictures taking a pistol and squarely aiming at their own foot, waiting to pull the trigger on opening day. Why? It's because we are the Borg. To paraphrase Mark Rosewater, Magic: The Gathering's head of Design (yes, yes, I'm a geek, I play Magic, I'm a level 48 Paladin in World of Warcraft, I list the ways Lucas screwed up in both the "Special Edition" original trilogy and the prequel [Episode III was pretty good, though]...), he constantly explains M:TG constant change as necessary because, like the token antagonist organization in Star Trek: The Next Generation, once one way to defeat/push back has been used, it can't be used again as The Borg (us) have learned from it and created countermeasures. Remember a few stories ago when JH wrote about how American Dog was going to be retooled with a plotline nearly identical to the "Lightyear's Identity" thread in Toy Story? What was his fear? That people whould see it, note the parallelism, and trash it (and the mouse) for the lack of originality. Aladdin had a "prince" facing difficult trials, a captive princess, and an evil royal advisor with a serious God complex and delusions of grandeur. Prince of Persia has a prince facing difficult trials, a captive princess, and an evil royal advisor with a serious God complex and delusions of grandeur. Case closed, no Purple Heart for the Mouse.

I mean, yeah, it was a decent game. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't, like, the blockbuster that at least one person at Ubi Soft hoped it would be. Oh, and that "Arabian Nights-esque fairy tale charm," la_resistance? I kinda glossed over that while I was getting the hang of the control mechanics and wondering why the Prince had to keep shedding clothes. Now, I will be honest, it may be good. As long as they don't let Uwe Boll get within an Astronomical Unit of it, it won't turn in to a piece of celluoid defecation a la everything else he's done. Still, don't expect this to be Citizen Kane, let alone a Curse of the Black Pearl. (The fact that the game spawned two more sequels gives me ominous visions of a Prince of Persia Reloaded and a Prince of Persia Revolutions...yeesh!) It's going to be a mediocre film because it came from a mediocre game. With game movies, you can't realistically do any better than how well the game did. You do a Halo, Halo 2, Final Fantasy VII, World of Warcraft, Legend of Zelda, you have a potential for an awe-inspiring piece of cinema...or another Super Mario Bros. film.

In conclusion, I probably won't see it unless someone else buys the ticket...and gives me a ride, as I don't have a car.

God bless cecilbdemented!  That is a funny dude.  Between him and DerekJ, this site occasionally hits AICN levels.  You're a level 48 Paladin... I, uh, happen to be a LEVEL 49(!) Paladin (whatever that means).

World of Warcraft, bhb, World of Warcraft...

I think the Snow movie sounds kinda fun and interesting, depending on how it's created and marketed. It shouldn't desecrate Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and it should be light, simple and Western-friendly, so the Matrix guy and all these martial arts honchos could mean too much martial arts and not enough story and kowtowing to multiculturalism.

But, not to raise a sore point, isn't that Oren Aviv guy the one who defended Mel Gibson and insisted on releasing Gibson's Apocalypto debacle after Gibson was caught drunk driving, threatening to ruin a policeman's career and making hateful comments about Jews? I mean, I wouldn't exactly trust HIS artistic judgment.

It does sound like a roster with possibilities. I've had enough Pirates forever.

Nicely put