What An Oscar Nomination Gets You Nowadays

Sarah Polley is going from 'Women Talking' to a live-action 'Bambi.'

I just had to share with you today’s funniest tweet, courtesy of Deadline:

EXCLUSIVE: Sarah Polley is on to the most epic undertaking of her filmmaking career thus far, as Deadline understands that the filmmaker is in talks to helm a live-action take on Bambi in very early development at Disney.

An “epic undertaking!” That’s not exactly how I would describe Disney’s most egregiously lazy form of IP recycling, but I guess if “epic” refers specifically to budget it’s probably correct.

Sarah Polley, if you’ll remember, is the one-time Ronna in Go (an underrated classic I will always go out of my way to mention) and writer of a recent memoir (it’s pretty great, you should read it) who is coming off an Oscar nomination for best adapted screenplay for Women Talking, which she also directed (something like her third non-doc feature, along with Away From Her and Take This Waltz). I didn’t love-love Women Talking, but it was incredibly well done for what was essentially a single-location movie. (My mom absolutely loved it, which I suppose is neither here nor there).

Multiple sources tell Deadline that the project is a musical to feature music from six-time Grammy-winning country star Kacey Musgraves. Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster (Transparent) wrote the most recent draft of the script, and Chris and Paul Weitz’s Depth of Field will produce.

The original Bambi was technically based on a novel — Felix Salten’s 1923 novel Bambi, a Life in the Woods — and I’m sure everyone involved will seize upon this fact to try to spin the new Bambi movie as being more true to the book, or perfect for Sarah Polley, coming off her adaptation of a different novel centered around mothers and daughters, and really it’s a story about family and blah blah blah. But come on, we all know what this is. Zero chance any of the execs involved in greenlighting this new about Felix Salten’s 1923 novel.

It continues a trend for Disney, of poaching arthouse and cult fave directors for the most obvious IP-driven slam dunks — think Chloe Zhao coming off Nomadland to direct Eternals, or Sam Raimi doing Doctor Strange 2, both of which were horrendous (I can always make myself laugh thinking about immortal superheros doing slow missionary sex on the beach in Eternals).

On one hand, you could look at it as a classic “one for me, one for them” situation, and to her credit, Sarah Polley is probably way behind on her “one for them” quota. On the other, if you’ve watched any of these movies, you know that the way Disney does this is particularly egregious, as it generally seems like the director with the cool name is present solely as a marketing hook, with very little recognizable imprint on the final product. It’s sad watching them get drained of their artistic energies by clout vampires.

Some version of this has probably been going on for 100 years, the only difference is that now it’s much more obvious, and that the IP recycling engine seems to account for 75% of all films that penetrate the public consciousness these days. The general public has gotten so out of the habit of regularly going to the movie theaters that the theaters are in legitimate danger of dying out. I don’t pretend to know how to fix that, but I do think taking artists who might actually be capable of getting non-regulars back to the movies and having them spend two years of their productive lives making bad slop for self-selecting hogs is short-term thinking. The problem with slopism is that eventually one runs out of hogs, as they say.

So I ask: can’t we let the AI write this stuff yet? I’m already dreading whatever dopey culture war fight they gin up for this one.