emma thompson – Alternate World

The first official trailer for Disney’s live-action adaptation of the animated classic, Beauty and the Beast is here. The remake will bring to life all of the characters from the original plus a new character, a harpsichord named Cadenza created just for the film played by Stanley Tucci. Alan Menken, composer for the original also returns and will introduce three new songs into the new film.

The film stars Emma Watson as Belle, Dan Stevens as the Beast, Luke Evans as Gaston, Josh Gad as Le Fou, Ewan McGregor as Lumière, Sir Ian McKellen as Cogsworth, Kevin Kline as Belle’s father Maurice, Emma Thompson as Mrs. Potts, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Plumette, with a script penned by Evan Spiliotopoulos and Stephen Chbosky, directed by Bill Condor.

Beauty and the Beast hits theaters March 17, 2017.

In this live-action re-imagining of the fairy tale, a young woman (Emma Watson) takes her father’s place as prisoner in a beast’s castle, only to fall in love with her beastly captor (Dan Stevens), who turns out to be a prince.

This week’s issue of Entertainment Weekly features our first look at Emma Watson while playing Belle in the iconic yellow dress from the upcoming live-action adaptation of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. The film set to release this March will be scored by Alan Menken who scored the original 1991 animated classic. The new adaptation will also feature three new original songs which the composer previously announced two of the tracks titled as: “Days in the Sun” and “Forever More”.

Watson recently spoke with EW and dropped a pretty big nugget of information revealing how the backstory for Belle has been retooled for the live-action adaptation. In the original Belle was a book-worm and her father, Maurice (Kevin Kline) was an inventor, however. In this version, it is Belle who is the inventor and her father constructs music boxes, each representing a different country, telling the story of Belle not traveling. After the loss of Belle’s mother, Maurice became over protective of Belle. The music boxes allow Belle to experience the rest of the world without actually traveling away from home.

Watson:

In the animated movie, it’s her father who is the inventor, and we actually co-opted that for Belle. I was like, ‘Well, there was never very much information or detail at the beginning of the story as to why Belle didn’t fit in, other than she liked books. Also what is she doing with her time?’ So, we created a backstory for her, which was that she had invented a kind of washing machine, so that, instead of doing laundry, she could sit and use that time to read instead. So, yeah, we made Belle an inventor.

Beauty and the Beast hits theaters March 17, 2017.

In this live-action re-imagining of the fairy tale, a young woman (Emma Watson) takes her father’s place as prisoner in a beast’s castle, only to fall in love with her beastly captor (Dan Stevens), who turns out to be a prince.