We will never be rid of the live-action Disney remake trend. Snow White flopping shelved the Tangled remake, sure, but 2026 will still bring a live-action Moana nobody asked for. Meanwhile, Lilo & Stitch will certainly become one of summer 2025’s biggest movies. That inevitably hefty box office gross will surely inspire Disney executives to green-light awful updates of The Princess and the Frog and Big Hero 6. This phenomenon can even withstand those unnerving Seven Dwarfs from Snow White. Even if the films themselves aren’t beloved long-term, their moneymaker status ensures this trend (unfortunately) won’t cease anytime soon.

But what if Disney had a different relationship between its homegrown animation division and its live-action movies? What if, instead of remaking beloved animated Disney films with flesh-and-blood people, Walt Disney Pictures instead created mid-budget family films out of unrealized concepts for Walt Disney Animation Studios titles?

The history of Walt Disney Animation Studios is littered with projects that never got off the ground. Die-hard Mouse House fans know of early ill-fated attempts to turn stories like Don Quixote and Chanticleer into animated features. In the 21st century, productions like My Peoples, Fraidy Cat, Mort, and Gigantic all reached various phases of development before problems arose. Even with Disney Animation’s sparse release schedule of doing (with the rare exception of years like 2000, 2016, and 2021) only one movie a year, there are still tons of proposed projects that never debuted on the silver screen despite making tremendous progress.

Some of these productions died on the vine simply because they weren’t very good to begin with. God only knows we didn’t need a lengthy short film starring Mickey Mouse as Christopher Columbus. Others, though, petered out over more complicated circumstances. My Peoples, for instance, famously went under due to external studio politics. These included the closure of Walt Disney Feature Animation Florida (the studio where the title would’ve been produced), Disney halting its hand-drawn animation efforts, and Disney brass opting for Chicken Little as Disney Animation’s 2005 tentpole rather than Peoples. Those aren’t exactly circumstances suggesting My Peoples (or A Few Good Ghosts or whatever title you want to call it) was inherently a subpar concept for a feature-length movie.

Several unrealized projects from the early 2000s died due to similar circumstances over Disney Animation’s uncertain future and feuding between then-Disney CEO Michael Eisner and Roy E. Disney. Titles like the Roger Allers movie Tam Lin and the Ron Clements and John Musker movie Fraidy Cat succumbed to these very circumstances. Earlier discarded titles like Wild Life, meanwhile, went under since they didn’t “fit” the Disney brand. Meanwhile, who’s to say later scrapped Disney Animation projects like King of the Elves couldn’t bounce back as live-action projects? Not every shelved movie is inherently doomed, and this collection of unrealized titles sounds rife with potential.

Given Disney Animation’s limited release slate, it’s not logical for the division to pause its exploits in favor of reviving projects from 2003. But if Walt Disney Pictures brass are enamored with imagining how a live-action Russo Brothers or McG version of Night on Bald Mountain would look, why not put those resources into live-action versions of unrealized stories? While Fraidy Cat, My Peoples, and American Dog (the original version of Bolt from director Chris Sanders) were all conceived as animated features, they could totally be reconstituted as live-action projects much more easily than finished Disney Animation Studios titles. These productions could now be reimagined from the ground up as live-action projects utilizing tangible resources.

That sounds already like a more exciting prospect than reverse-engineering characters created first and foremost for stylized hand-drawn animation (like Pleakley, Timon & Pumbaa, or The Genie) into creepy, realistically CG abominations. Heck, new live-action takes on these concepts could even realize certain stylized characters in other forms beyond digital animation, like puppetry. There are all kinds of exciting visual effects possibilities out there beyond just the realistic digital animation style Disney insists on deploying for its remakes.

Meanwhile, doing live-action takes on these unrealized Disney Animation Studios would give modern-day directors more exhilarating creative freedom. Updating Aladdin, Snow White, The Lion King, or any other Disney Animation canon title means contending with the good and bad legacy of these projects. You’re either navigating a minefield of outdated problems (hi Snow White and Dumbo!) or you’re just regurgitating what people liked about the original. In contrast, general audiences don’t know the worlds of My Peoples and Tam Lin. That offers up a more expansive creative canvas for artists to work on than just rehashing Hercules or Tangled in live action.

Best of all, inspiring new live-action iterations of these unrealized Disney Animation titles (which could, in the lengthy process to the silver screen, look way different than originally intended) could finally offer artistic closure to projects sidelined over outlandish reasons. At least when Kingdom of the Sun was jettisoned, it transformed into the beloved Emperor’s New Groove. Glen Keane’s audacious classical fairy tale Rapunzel, meanwhile, became the Disney masterpiece Tangled. There was no such fairy tale ending for My Peoples, Fraidy Cat, or countless other abandoned Disney Animation projects. They’ve languished in obscurity simply because of forces no director or animator could control like the perceived viability of hand-drawn animation or Eisner’s corporate demands.

The folks who toiled on these projects and the artistry they poured into these unfinished characters deserved better. Inspiring modern live-action movies might not be the ideal end goal, say, director Barry Cook had in mind when he conjured up My Peoples decades ago. But at least that and other scrapped Disney Animation productions could exist within the general consciousness. Plus, resurrecting these yarns could fire up the creativity and artistry of a new generation of artists. Blending old and new creatives could create a far more interesting relationship between Disney’s animation and live-action divisions. Disney, everyone the world over is begging you: stop making CG nightmare fuel out of beloved hand-drawn animated characters. Instead, focus on breathing new life into Disney Animation stories that have never previously graced the silver screen.