Luke Evans soon to appear on Beauty and The Beast prequel series
Luke Evans, who portrayed the cunning antagonist in the 2017 adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, has provided an update on his Disney+ spin-off series alongside LeFou (Josh Gad). Be sure to give five cheers and twelve hip-hips since it’s still going on.
In a discussion with Entertainment Weekly that was released on September 8, he said, “It’s been placed on hold.” Because this is a very significant legacy, “we just want to make sure that it is absolutely the best it can be. If that means we just have to wait a little longer to finesse some elements of it, then that’s what we’re going to do.”
With “the finest tale we can provide,” the writers want to “respect” the characters, according to Luke Evans, but it “is going to happen” at “some point in the near future.”
Luke Evans in Beauty and The Beast Prequel
The spin-off, he continued, will concentrate on how Gaston and LeFou met and developed into the team that appears in Beauty and the Beast. This idea, he said, “opened up multiple cans of worms.”
“It has been a great pleasure to explore a story of those two people and also new characters, and then bring them right up to the moment where you meet them in the movie,” he said. “There are numerous possible outcomes. That is where we have gone thus far and, hopefully, where we will go in the future.”
In 2017, the movie garnered attention for claiming that Gad’s character LeFou had a “exclusively gay moment,” but many critics—including Gad—believe the sequence (in which LeFou danced with another man right before the credits) didn’t go far enough. When asked if LeFou’s orientation will be discussed, Luke Evans responded he was “not sure.”
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He said, “There are so many aspects of these two people that we don’t truly know about their backstories. I believe that was the direction we were going with the notion and concept: “Were they always these monsters or were they different? It’s kind of like, no one’s born terrible. Things happen, you make horrible mistakes, or you choose to make a decision that effects the rest of your life. I thus hope that we will soon be able to tell that narrative to you folks.”
Disney+ now has Beauty and the Beast available for viewing.
The live-action remake of Disney‘s 1991 animated picture of the same name, which was in turn an adaptation of Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s 1756 version of the fairy tale, is called Beauty and the Beast and was directed by Bill Condon from a screenplay by Stephen Chbosky and Evan Spiliotopoulos.
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Emma Watson and Dan Stevens play the titular Belle and the Beast, with Luke Evans, Josh Gad, Stanley Tucci, Ewan McGregor, Kevin Kline, Audra McDonald, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Ian McKellen, and Emma Thompson playing supporting roles. The ensemble cast also includes a choir.
Watson, Luke Evans, Stevens, and the rest of the cast joined between January and April 2015 for the live-action Beauty and the Beast remake, which was first announced in April 2014 with Condon as its director. From May to August 2015, Shepperton Studios in England served as the primary location for filming. It is one of the most costly movies ever created with a budget of approximately $255 million.
On February 23, 2017, Beauty and the Beast had its London premiere at Spencer House. On March 17, 2017, it was theatrically released in the US in normal, Disney Digital 3-D, IMAX, RealD 3D, and IMAX 3D formats, as well as in Dolby Cinema.
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Critics gave the movie generally favourable reviews, praising its fidelity to the original animated film as well as elements from the Broadway musical, performances by the cast (especially Watson and Stevens), visual aesthetic, musical score, songs, costume design, and production values. However, there was criticism for some of the character designs and its undue similarity to the original. After Star Wars: The Last Jedi, it became the second-highest-grossing movie of 2017 with over $1.2 billion in worldwide box office receipts, ranking it as the tenth-highest-grossing movie of all time. It also set a record for live-action musical movies. The movie won multiple awards, including four nominations at the 23rd Critics’ Choice Awards, two nominations at the 71st British Academy Film Awards, two nominations at the 90th Academy Awards, and two nominations overall.
Little Town, a spin-off television series that was in the works, has been put on hold indefinitely.
Disney had previously started making a movie based on the 1994 Broadway musical. But in a 2011 interview, composer Alan Menken claimed the proposed movie adaptation of the stage musical Beauty and the Beast “was canned.”
After producing earlier live-action fantasy movies including Alice in Wonderland, Maleficent, Cinderella, and The Jungle Book, Walt Disney Pictures has already started creating a new live-action version of Beauty and the Beast by April 2014. Approximately two months later, Bill Condon agreed to take over the directing duties, working with an Evan Spiliotopoulos script.
The script was revised by Stephen Chbosky, who also directed Emma Watson in The Perks of Being a Wallflower, later in September of the same year.
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Disney approached Condon with a suggestion to remake the movie in a more radical style, similar to how Universal Studios changed Snow White and the Huntsman, before Condon was recruited to direct the movie (2012). The studio initially replied, “We’re interested in a musical to some extent, but just half full of songs,” as Condon later recalled. However, after Frozen debuted, they “saw that there was this tremendous international demand for an old-school-musical approach.
