Disney

This boy's summer vacation has gotten off to an amazing start.

Star Wars Rebels feels the force of a largely unexplored period in Star Wars history, but did you know the Disney XD animated series owes quite a bit to Ralph McQuarrie’s original movie concept art? Or that it needs its own continuity expert on the films? These are just some of the Imperial intelligence to uncover in the eighth episode of ‘You Think You Know TV?,’ which ignites the spark of Disney’s Star Wars Rebels!

Acquiring Lucasfilm and Marvel were just two minor steps in Disney’s grand plan to eventually own everything you love and control your life as Entertainment Overlord Supreme of the Planet Earth. But to be fair, they are a benevolent god. A caring god. A god that wants to make its riches available to you, should you want to indulge yourself. So prepare thyself: TV channels based entire on Marvel and Star Wars content may be coming.

It was inevitable: Disney is making a live action Winnie the Pooh movie because of course Disney would make a live action Winnie the Pooh movie. The studio’s tactic of bringing their animated properties into the live action realm has already paid off with Alice in Wonderland, Maleficent and Cinderella, so why not pay another visit to the Hundred Acre Wood and let a live action Christopher Robin hang out with a CGI Piglet?

The news out of Disney’s shareholder meeting keeps on coming. This one isn’t much of a surprise: Disney is making Frozen 2. In a related story, the sky is blue and water is wet (until a princess with freezing powers comes along and turns it into ice).

For months it’s been rumored, now it’s confirmed: Rian Johnson, the writer and director of Brick and Looper is officially the writer and director of Star Wars: Episode VIII. Disney CEO Robert Iger also revealed to company shareholders today that Episode VIII has its official release date: May 26, 2017 — 40 years and a single day after the release of the very first Star Wars back in 1977.

The name “Disney” brings to mind images of fair princesses, charming princes, magical fairy tales, and simple happily ever afters. In recent years, though, Disney has begun rethinking their classic properties, and releasing more thematically complex versions of their famous films. Sleeping Beauty became Maleficent, which turned a wicked witch into a sympathetic anti-hero; a whole mess of fairy tales turned into Into the Woods, where happily ever after preceded a whole bunch of death and tragedy. The ranks of Disney Princesses grew to include women like Merida, the bow-slinging heroine of Brave, and Anna and Else from Frozen, who rescued each other from an prince, rather than the other way around. Every value and concept that Disney had established and reinforced through decades of repetition was seemingly up for reconsideration and revision.

With their new Cinderella just days away, Disney is continuing its streak of turning its animated classics into live-action features with the news, via the Wall Street Journal, that Dumbo is ready to make the transition from animated elephant to ... well, still-animated elephant surrounded by live-action actors. If that idea doesn’t get your ears flapping, maybe this will: the Journal says Tim Burton will be the man who’ll direct the new Dumbo.

If you saw Big Hero 6, you fell in love with Baymax, there's just no way around it. He doesn't just save the day, he’s also lovable and sweet and cuddly. And, that's no accident. Disney animators based a lot of Baymax’s look on a young child. His walk was specifically modeled after a toddler with a full diaper. These are just some of the super duper facts packed into the latest episode of You Think You Know Movies, which returns to Disney and Marvel's Big Hero 6!

After years of false starts and delays, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales finally began filming in Australia yesterday. And that’s not a moment too soon for the franchise’s star, Johnny Depp, who hasn’t headlined a hit since 2011’s Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. So, this brings up two important questions. First, will a fifth Captain Jack Sparrow adventure resuscitate Depp in a post-Mortdecai world? Secondly, can new directors Espen Sandberg and Joachim Rønning inject new life into a series that ran out of steam two movies ago?