While it's not unknown for studios to shut down animated films already in production, even though they've been announced (see – or don't, because we can't – Pixar's unmade Newt), it's more unusual for movies that have been pimped at a couple of D23 events and been handed release dates to suddenly vanish from the schedules. Yet that's the fate of Disney's Gigantic.
Quietly launched a few years ago as Giants, but then formally announced as Gigantic at the D23 convention in 2015, the film was to have been directed by Tangled's Nathan Greno and Inside Out co-writer Meg LeFauve, with songs in the works from Frozen duo Robert Lopez and Kirsten Anderson-Lopez.
The story would have been set in Spain during the age of exploration (so somewhere roughly between the 15th and 17th centuries), this new take on Jack And The Beanstalk finds adventure-seeker Jack heading into the clouds in what starts as a fairly traditional take on the fairy tale. But things soon change when he meets Inma, an 11-year-old girl who just so happens to be 60-feet tall and part of a world filled with giants. No single castle and grumpy fee-fi-fo-fum-ing here; this is a land populated with giants of all stripes and sizes, mostly huge.
Most dangerous among them are the Storm Giants, and its these villains that the tiny Jack, along with his giant new friend will have to deal with. But not before Inma has made his life briefly a misery, since he’s roughly the size of a doll to her.
Now, though, it has been shut down by Disney bosses John Lasseter and Ed Catmull. "It’s impossible to know when we begin a project how the creative process will unfold, and sometimes, no matter how much we love an idea or how much heart goes into it, we find that it just isn’t working," Catmull confirmed in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter. "With Gigantic, we’ve come to that point, and although it’s a difficult decision, we are ending active development for now. We are focusing our energies on another project that has been in the works, which we’ll be sharing more about soon, now set for Thanksgiving 2020."
Nothing is known about that mysterious movie, though according to the magazine's report, it'll be an original film. Disney's Feature Animation arm next has Ralph Breaks The Internet: Wreck-It Ralph 2 arriving on 30 November next year.
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