Disney’s 'Lilo & Stitch' Remake Set To Bring Back Three Original Stars, Including The Original Director As Stitch
Disney’s 'Lilo & Stitch' Remake Set To Bring Back Three Original Stars, Including The Original Director As Stitch
Plus, find out who’s been recast, and whose roles have been confirmed
Just days after news broke of Courtney B. Vance’s casting in Disney’s hybrid Lilo & Stitch remake, with production underway in Hawaii, the bigger picture has been made clear. More cast and characters, role clarifications, and even a recast. It’s all pretty big.
To start, the headliner: Chris Sanders, who directed, co-wrote, and designed the characters of the original film and voiced the furry blue alien in the latter part of the title, essentially the creator of the franchise, is in final negotiations to reprise the role, as he had been rumored to since the earliest rumblings of the remake’s existence. Apparently, he had only been approached in the last seven months, since he claims to have not been as of a September 2022 interview. In the years since Leroy & Stitch, Sanders moved onto DreamWorks after being removed from Disney’s American Dog, which eventually became Bolt. There, he was first put on what would become The Croods, before reteaming with his Lilo & Stitch collaborator Dean DeBlois for How to Train Your Dragon, after which DeBlois soloed directorial duties, while Sanders remained an executive producer. In the time that he was at DreamWorks he would continue to voice Stitch in whatever new western media existed, so not the Stitch! anime or Stitch and Ai, but like Kingdom Hearts games and Disney Infinity, doing so most recently for Disney Dreamlight Valley.
As for the rest of the cast, nothing’s changed about newcomer Maia Kealoha playing Lilo, or Sydney Elizebeth Agudong playing Nani, however the role of Nani’s love interest David Kawena has been recast. Instead of Kahiau Machado as reported last week, though Disney never confirmed, Kaipot Dudoit has now been cast in the role. During their vetting process, Disney found Machado using racial slurs on his social media posts, however old they may be. Two new characters are original to this remake played by familiar faces. Tia Carrere, the voice of Nani in all voiced appearances, plays the newly created Mrs. Kekoa, erroneously reported to be replacing Cobra Bubbles as the story’s social worker earlier in the week (with the wrong actress too, as it turns out). The ubiquitous Amy Hill, who was the franchise’s voice of shopkeeper Mrs, Hasagawa, will be playing a character named Tūtū. Elsewhere, as it turns out, Zach Galifianakis isn’t playing Pleakley after all. He’s playing Dr. Jumba Jookiba, Stitch’s creator (and creator of the 625 experiments prior) played by David Ogden Stiers in American productions. Who is playing Pleakley (originally voiced by Kevin McDonald)? That would be Billy Magnussen, which means the duo is complete.
Dean Fleischer Camp, director of Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, is directing this remake marked for Disney+. The Hawaii-set story is about Lilo, a lonely orphaned girl under the care of her sister Nani with social workers on their backs. She ends up bonding with a dog-like alien named Stitch, who was genetically engineered to be a force of destruction (and has his own bounty hunters in pursuit) over a shared sense of family. And a heavy dose of Elvis Presley along the way. Chris Kekaniokalani Bright wrote the script for the adaptation. Mike Van Waes wrote the original screenplay.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter