Disney has been remaking their animated classics as live-action blockbusters for a while, but they’re not always straight redos. Some of them take the villain and make them the semi-hero. Instead of a new Sleeping Beauty, we got Maleficent, with Angelina Jolie as a sympathetic version of its black-horned witch. And instead of another 101 Dalmatians (or 102), we’ve got Cruella, in which Oscar-winning thespian Emma Stone acts the origin of the dog fur-loving baddie.
The new sneak peek not only doesn’t look like 101 Dalmatians, it doesn’t look like any Disney movie either. Stone’s Cruella De Vil is reimagined as a young, idealistic fashion designer in the 1970s who’s turned mad by her rivalry with Emma Thompson’s fashion house mogul. To the strains of a cover of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”, Stone’s Cruella goes from dowdy nice girl to dying her hair monochromatic, crashing galas with a motorcycle, and getting into some shenanigans with the help of scene-stealer Paul Walter Hauser.
How Cruella goes from fashion to crime is something we’ll have to wait to see, but it looks like a wild ride, and very much a sister film to I, Tonya, the movie that undoubtedly got director Craig Gillespie this gig. It arrives, in theaters (so far), on May 28.
