Lin-Manuel Miranda, Alan Menken team up for live-action 'Little Mermaid' (original) (raw)

Published on August 16, 2016 07:10PM EDT

Photo: Disney; D Dipasupil/FilmMagic; Stuart C. Wilson/Getty Images

Lin-Manuel Miranda is a Disney fan first and a Hamilton genius second, and now he’s part of what must be his own personal dream world: The Broadway star will team up with legendary composer Alan Menken for Disney’s live-action feature adaptation of The Little Mermaid, which has been rumored to be in the works at Disney for months, EW has confirmed. Deadline first reported the news.

Now, it seems to be swimming forward, with Miranda also set to produce alongside Marc Platt (who is also producing Disney’s upcoming Mary Poppins Returns, starring Miranda and Emily Blunt). Menken penned the original film’s songs with the late Howard Ashman, and returned under the sea to write additional songs for the 2007 Broadway musical with Glenn Slater.

Before _The Little Mermaid_‘s comeback, Miranda will make his Disney songwriting debut with Moana, the next big-ticket film out of Disney’s animation arm, due in theaters Nov. 23.

Add Little Mermaid to the long, exciting list of Disney’s animation-to-live-action adaptations in the pipeline: After this year’s The Jungle Book, fans can look forward to confirmed features like Beauty and the Beast, Cruella, Dumbo, and a Tinker Bell pic, as well as once-reported projects like Peter Pan, Winnie the Pooh, Mulan, The Sword in the Stone, and Genies.

Miranda told EW last December that Mermaid is “the movie that’s probably most responsible for me being here. I started taping the Oscars because I wanted to see Geoffrey Holder’s performance of ‘Under the Sea.’ That was the beginning of the end. Or, the beginning of the beginning, depending on how you look at it … I could sing you not only the songs in Little Mermaid but the music to the score. That’s how important those scores are in my life and in my upbringing.”