Disney’s Live-Action ‘Pinocchio’: Release Date, Cast, Plot, and More

Fans of classic Disney must have been wishing particularly hard last night, as we now have the first teaser trailer for the latest in Disney’s line of live-action remakes of their classic movies: a live-action (well, plus a good deal of CGI) Pinocchio. The teaser only gives us about a minute of actual footage from the remake, but we all pretty much already know where this is headed.

Premiering on September 8 of this year, the film is directed by Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future, The Polar Express) and stars Tom Hanks as Geppetto, Benjamin Evan Ainsworth as Pinocchio, Cynthia Erivo as the Blue Fairy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Jiminy Cricket, Keegan-Michael Key as “Honest John,” with Lorraine Bracco a new character Sofia the Seagull and Luke Evans as the Coachman.

There’s a tiny plot synopsis amounting to this being a “live action retelling of the beloved tale of a wooden puppet who embarks on a thrilling adventure to become a real boy,” but the costuming and shot-for-shot style of the trailer, as well as touting this as being from the same studio as the live-action Beauty and the Beast (2017) and Lion King (2019), indicates that this is more likely to be a shot-for-shot remake akin to those movies more than a new adaptation of the original text.

Confusingly enough, this will not be the only version of Pinocchio hitting a streaming service in this year; Guillermo Del Toro’s stop-motion Pinocchio, with Ewan McGregor voicing the Cricket, will be premiering on Netflix in December of 2022. There was also a Russian animated movie called Pinocchio: A True Story that premiered in late February of this year.

In any case, it’s a good time to be a puppet wanting to be a real boy.

(featured image: Disney)

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Kimberly Terasaki

Kimberly Terasaki is a contributing writer for The Mary Sue. She has been writing articles for them since 2018, going on 5 years of working with this amazing team. Her interests include Star Wars, Marvel, DC, Horror, intersectional feminism, and fanfiction; some are interests she has held for decades, while others are more recent hobbies. She liked Ahsoka Tano before it was cool, will fight you about Rey being a “Mary Sue,” and is a Kamala Khan stan.