Samantha Lorraine Will Be Dora The Explorer In Next Live-Action Movie
Where are we going? Back to the movies!
It’s Samantha Lorraine’s turn to lead the way. Fresh off the April debut of her CGI reboot series and its subsequent renewal on and by Paramount+, Dora the Explorer is ready to head back to her live action teenage years with another film.
Lorraine, whose first credits included PBS series Kid Stew and AMC’s The Walking Dead: World Beyond, is best known for her role as offending best friend Lydia Rodriguez Katz in last year’s Netflix coming-of-age comedy You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah. She has now been cast in the title role in the film currently working as Dora and the Search for Sol Dorado. It is unknown how much of a follow-up to the previous film Dora and the Lost City of Gold it will be, but it is being made for Paramount+ and Nickelodeon instead of aiming for another theatrical release. When this new film was first announced in July 2022 (and targeted for a 2023 release?) it was said to be at the very least “inspired by the tone” of the James Bobin-directed film.
Regardless, the casting makes a lot of sense. 2019 was 5 years ago. Isabela Merced, whose turn as Dora in Lost City of Gold was her last to be credited as Isabela Moner, has been this year in Madame Web and the just-released Max original film (one of very few under the Discovery regime) Turtles All the Way Down. She still has Alien: Romulus to come and begins as Hawkgirl in Superman, the first of what is sure to be many appearances in the new DC Universe when it releases next July. And that’s on top of recurring on the second season of The Last Of Us. She long gone.
The plot synopsis indicates that cousin Diego will be a main character alongside her again, and it mentions “new friends”, though it’s unclear if it will be the first film’s Sammy Moore and Randy Warren, who were played by Madeleine Madden and Nicholas Coombe, or if they’ll go for completely new names to go along with the presumably new faces. Together, they will “trek through perilous dangers of the Amazonian jungle in search of the ancient treasure of Sol Dorado in order to keep this powerful treasure out of enemy hands.” It is directed by Alberto Belli, who directed Disney+ Christmas film The Naughty Nine and episodes of the no-longer-available Disney Channel series Ultra Violet and Black Scorpion. It is written by J. T. Billings, who has experience with Nickelodeon reboots as showrunner and executive producer of the Are You Afraid of the Dark? reboot, and wrote a few episodes of it.
Dora continues to supplant Blue’s Clues & You! as the company’s preschool reboot darling like the original series were. The former premiered mere weeks after the latter series was removed from Paramount+, though the series’s movie, original to the platform Blue’s Big City Adventure, remains. Dora and the Search for Sol Dorado is now poised to join it.
Sources: The Hollywood Reporter, What’s On Paramount+, IMDb