Development Hell / Disney & Pixar

Concept Art of Gigantic, which would've been the 59th film in the Disney Animated Canon.

There are many proposed Disney films that never ever saw the light of day past pre-production. A few are mentioned in the books, Disney Lost and Found and The Disney That Never Was, and you can find others mentioned on old, never-updated fan sites like this one.

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Disney Films

• Wild Life (not to be confused with The Wild) was about an elephant who becomes the darling of a city's human nightclub scene. The film was intended to be the studio's first fully CG animated feature, predating Chicken Little by several years. It initially began as a Pygmalion-esque story designed to show children the shallowness of the world of glitz and fashion but morphed into a more cynical story set in the club scene of Big City during the era when David Bowie and The Velvet Underground hung out with jet-setters in urban clubs. The film was ultimately shelved because, to quote Solomon, "...insurmountable problems arose, especially between the decadent milieu of the later versions and the requirements of the traditional Disney audience" (in other words, the setting and tone simply weren't, nor couldn't be made, family-friendly), though it did get some concept art made during its two years in development (found here).
• A lost movie that haunts many Disney fans was "The Search for Mickey Mouse", which would have featured every animated Disney character to date onscreen together. Originally proposed as a brief gag in a Roger Rabbit short (Roger would have been startled by the sight of every Disney character riding past in a train), the idea later developed into a feature film where a team of Disney characters led by Basil of Baker Street look for Mickey Mouse, who had been "Mouse-napped". While the film was meant to be Disney's 50th animated feature, that spot was taken by Tangled, with no word about what happened to the project (though it's speculated that it was dropped due to there being not much to the idea beyond its novelty). Oddly enough, around the time the film entered development limbo, the idea of searching for a missing Mickey Mouse cropped up in this very, VERY odd commemorative television special. The concept of a large Disney crossover would eventually be revisited for a memorable sequence in Ralph Breaks the Internet and the short film Once Upon a Studio, which acts as the company's Milestone Celebration short.
• Disney almost made an animated adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are in the '80s, which would have had hand-drawn characters on CGI backgrounds and been directed by John Lasseter. Some test footage showed it would have been closer in style to the book than the Spike Jonze film. It was canceled because, at the time, Disney had no faith in CGI animation.
• A relatively well-known abandoned Disney movie is The Gremlins (no relation to the Joe Dante film), which would have been based upon a story written by Roald Dahl. It was abandoned due to both legal issues from a man who claimed Dahl plagiarized him and because it was a World War 2 film that was being made when the war was ending. The story was eventually published as a picture book by Dark Horse comics, and the Gremlins would show up in Epic Mickey as maintenance workers in Wasteland.
• After completing The Little Mermaid, John Musker and Ron Clements were offered three projects: Swan Lake, King of the Jungle, and Aladdin. They chose Aladdin, and while King of the Jungle became The Lion King, Swan Lake was never produced because Musker and Clements thought the story sounded too similar to The Little Mermaid. While Disney hasn't touched the idea, a Disney-esque adaptation was later made.
• Walt Disney obtained the rights to some books from the Land of Oz series in 1954, with the intent of adapting some of them into a musical titled The Rainbow Road to Oz. The cast of the film even performed some songs in the fourth season premiere of Walt Disney Presents, which revealed that Dorothy, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion (whom the public remembered from MGM's The Wizard of Oz) would play major roles, as would the Patchwork Girl and Ozma, who hadn't appeared in a movie since the silent era. For whatever reason, Walt ended up canceling The Rainbow Road to Oz and instead adapted Babes in Toyland for his first live-action musical. Plans for a live-action Disney movie about the Oz books ultimately became fulfilled with both Return to Oz and Oz the Great and Powerful.
• During The '40s, Walt Disney and Samuel Goldwyn discussed collaborating on a movie about Hans Christian Andersen. Most of the scenes would have appeared in live-action, but Disney's crew would have also prepared animated shorts of Andersen's fairy tales to play during the picture. Disney abandoned the project when producing WWII propaganda, prompting Goldwyn to alter the movie into an all live-action musical about Andersen and his stories, Hans Christian Andersen (1952). One of the stories considered for adapting into one of the cartoon shorts, The Snow Queen, was greenlit by Disney and evolved into Frozen.
• In 1966, J. R. R. Tolkien's publisher asked Disney Studios if they would be interested in adapting the The Lord of the Rings trilogy into an animated film. The studio declined due to how costly it would be.
• There was supposed to be a feature produced at the Florida animation studio (titles included My Peoples, Angel and Her No Good Sister, and A Few Good Ghosts) that would have been set to a bluegrass score and featured the voices of Dolly Parton and Lily Tomlin. The plot would have been about a family of ghosts possessing various wooden figures, and it would have employed Medium Blending: the wooden figures would have been in CGI, while everything else would be traditionally-animated. Unfortunately, Disney's decision to abandon traditional animation caused the project to be canceled in November 2003, shortly before the Florida studio closed in January 2004.
• In the mid-2000s, there were plans for a movie named Fraidy Cat, created by John Musker and Ron Clements as their first CGI movie. The plot was about a cat living in London who finds himself in a Hitchcock-style thriller, somewhat based on North By Northwest and Vertigo. Despite the story reels being well-received by other animators and the at-the-time head of animation, it was scrapped because Disney higher-ups thought no kid would know who Alfred Hitchcock was and understand or be interested in a story affectionately spoofing his work.
• During a 2013 interview with the "Stories of the Magic" podcast, 1990s Mouseketeer Jennifer McGill mentioned that she, Chase Hampton, and Tiffini Hale had auditioned for a proposed movie based on the original The Mickey Mouse Club titled "Why, Because We Like You". The movie was scrapped shortly after the final auditions due to the 1988 Writer's Guild strike, resulting in their tapes being moved over to the 1989-95 Mickey Mouse Club auditions and their subsequent casting there.
• Disney once had plans to adapt Don Quixote and The Emperor and the Nightingale.
• The Song Of Sundiata was a scrapped film set in Africa based on the Epic of Sundiata.
• Uncle Stiltskin was a sequel to Rumplestiltskin where the titular character would try to steal a baby but discover the true meaning of family along the way.
• In the early 1990s, Disney announced several films, but none ended up being made: Sinbad the Sailor, Homer's Odyssey, Song Of The Sea, and Silly Hillbillies On Mars.
• In the early 1970s there were plans for a movie named Scruffy. It was set during World War II and featured Barbary apes on the side of the British.
• An adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood, named Little Red's Wolf, was once in development but nothing much came out of it. Concept art was featured in an artbook for Chicken Little, but little is known of the project aside from it being a Fractured Fairytale similar to Hoodwinked!. It was scrapped due to being seen as too similar to the then-upcoming Shrek.
• The Last Songbird was pitched in 2003 but was declined because... one of the higher-ups disliked birds.
• A film based on Tam Lin was pitched but rejected for being "too Irish".
• Disney announced in 2008 that a 3D adaptation of Philip K. Dick's short story "The King of the Elves" was scheduled for 2012, but the project got shelved in 2009. Reports in 2010 and 2011 claimed that the project had gone back into development with a new director and script writer. Concept art has been leaked, but there hasn't been any news on that front since then. It's been assumed the project has been quietly canceled
• Gigantic (originally named Giants) was going to be the 59th movie in the Disney Animated Canon, and was set to be released in 2018. The film was then pushed back to 2020 before it was ultimately canceled due to creative complications. Unlike most scrapped Disney films, a lot is known about it:
  • It would have been directed by Nathan Greno (director of Tangled) and Meg LeFauve (writer for Inside Out). The film would have been loosely based on Jack and the Beanstalk, and set in Spain during the Age of Discovery. It would've been about a man named Jack befriending a young giant named Inma. A parody of it appears in Zootopia wherein a bootlegged, animal version of it called Giraffic is being sold by Duke Weaselton.
  • When the first plot details were announced, they had little in common with the final plot about a man and a young giant girl. Several scrapped characters were mentioned:
  (...) For one thing, they both have a hero called Jack, and Giants named for the Fee Fi Fo Fum rhymes. In this story, these names are abbreviations of Feebus, Fifen, Fogel and Fobert, a family of giants at the heart of the tale. There’s another brother too, Faustus, their leader. Like all good villains, he’s got a relatable point of view, he’s just not quite joining the dots correctly. Also like Singer’s film, we see the introduction of a love interest from a class above Jack. In this case, Angelina isn't royalty, but just from a merchant family, though her parents do see him as being “below” her. The real money is manifest in Marco, born to nobility and the third corner of a love triangle with Jack and Angelina. He’s a good guy, though, and the only reason he and Jack can’t be fast friends from the off is that they're both drawn to Angelina. And, yes, he’s called Marco because, like Polo, he wants to travel – and to open up trade routes.
  • Inma was originally a tomboyish human instead of a girly giant, and was also a secondary character instead of a protagonist:
  The fourth human lead is Inma, a scrappy tomboy type – and something of a class warrior, I understand. She’s the one I'm rooting for in this story, the tireless fighter against injustice, taken less seriously because she happens to be a pre-teen girl.
  • There was an early version of a song shown off at a convention about Inma playing with Jack as if he was a living doll where she describes him as her "little man".
• Disney Princess Enchanted Tales: Follow Your Dreams was a Stillborn Franchise due to poor sales, only having one Compilation Movie. Due to this, a lot was scrapped:
  • Early trailers have the film as titled Disney Princess Enchanted Tales: A Kingdom of Kindness. It featured a completely different Aurora story and, instead of Jasmine, the second story starred Belle from Beauty and the Beast. It also featured the original cast, too. An abridged video of the Aurora story appeared on the first Cinderella III: A Twist in Time DVD, and the DVD of the final version showed off a Cut Song called "You'll Never Lose This Love" sung by Belle and Mrs. Potts to Chip.
  • The unreleased second film in the series, only known as Disney Princess Enchanted Tales, was to have stories based on Cinderella and Mulan. A 2009 re-release of Follow Your Dreams (timed to help promote The Princess and the Frog) added AMVs for the songs that Cinderella and Mulan would've sung (with Stock Footage from their finished DTV sequels, rather than scenes from the unreleased shorts).
• Chanticleer and the Fox: A Chaucerian Tale was a planned film after 101 Dalmatians. It originally began production in the 1940s, was put on hold, revived in the 1960s, canceled, briefly revived again in the 1980s, and canceled for good. There are two different reasons why it was canceled. One was that Walt was having money issues related to Disney World and needed to scrap either The Jungle Book (or The Sword and the Stone, depending on where you're hearing the story) or Chanticleer and the Fox, and Chanticleer and the Fox lost because humans were easier to animate. Another simpler reason was that a film starring a chicken just seemed too silly. Some elements were reused for Robin Hood (1973) and the attraction America Sings and, while Disney never adapted the play, Don Bluth did in the 1990s with Rock-A-Doodle.
• An animated musical based on Marco Polo's life with songs by Stephen Weiner and Glenn Slater was in development at one point.
• Disneytoon Studios had an original project called "GHOST PROJECT". Concept art exists, but nothing else is known about it except for the obvious fact that it involved ghosts.
• The Little Broomstick was in development in the 1980s, but was shelved in favor of The Black Cauldron. Studio Ponoc would later adapt the novel into Mary and The Witch's Flower.
• During the mid-1980s, there were plans to adapt Mistress Masham's Repose as an animated feature. However, CEO Michael Eisner canceled the project due to not liking the overall concept.
• In the 2000s, rumors were around that Disney wanted to remake several of their films as All CGI Cartoons, an idea that didn't come into fruition until The Lion King (2019). Before that, many other Disney movies received live-action remakes instead.
• Morgan's Ghost was a canceled 1940 film starring Mickey, Donald, and Goofy that was shelved due to World War 2. It involved the trio looking for buried treasure with the help of pirate ghosts. It would have been the first film to use Mickey's third redesign and the first to star Mickey, Donald, and Goofy together. The story was heavily reworked and shortened into a Donald Duck comic.
• Hiawatha was spun off of the short Lil Hiawatha (which was inspired by a poem/song). It was fully written and storyboarded, but it was shelved in 1949 due to Disney's financial struggle. Unlike the short, Hiawatha was a man in the film instead of a little boy. While it was canceled, the film was a huge influence on Pocahontas.
• The Rescuers Polar Opposite, loosely based on the book The Rescuers, was supposed to star Louie Prima as a bear named Louie. Louie Prima even composed songs from the film, but it was canceled after he had a heart attack. The film was reimagined without Louie the Bear and became The Rescuers.
• Catfish Bend was a canceled tie-in film to their ride Splash Mountain. It was axed in favor of Oliver & Company, though Splash Mountain still references Catfish Bend by name.
• Army Ants was the original (canceled) film that inspired both A Bug's Life and Antz. It was about a pacifistic ant who lived in a militaristic colony.
• In the 1990s, Disney was working on an Incan-themed romance film loosely based on The Prince and the Pauper named "Kingdom of the Sun". Due to a Troubled Production and differing developmental views, the film was pushed back a year and eventually heavily retooled into The Emperor's New Groove. A documentary about this film's evolution, The Sweatbox, was made, but never given an official release.
• Aside from the aforementioned Hans Christian Andersen movie mentioned above, Disney had been attempting different projects based on The Snow Queen dating back several decades. In the 2000s, they attempted a project that got as far as having several storyboards and models posted online. It was meant to be an All-CGI Cartoon where the Snow Queen was a monarch who froze all her potential suave-but-phony suitors and became both a literal and figurative Defrosting Ice Queen once she met a true-hearted man, Kai. The obsessive focus on expanding the role of the Snow Queen herself derailed many attempts at the story over the years. One of the Eisner-era pitches involved aging up the children and making Kai/Snow Queen the main pairing and depicting Gerda as a shallow Gold Digger villain. Despite having much less involvement in Disney films at the time than he had in the 1980s and 90s, the Snow Queen seemed to be Eisner's pet project - he offered his support to the project and even suggested doing the film with John Lasseter at Pixar Animation Studios once the two studios got their contracts renewed. Furthermore, Alan Menken and Glenn Slater were originally tasked with writing the songs. One of those songs, "Love Can't Be Denied," received a public release before Menken left the project. Disney finally settled on a version that they liked, which became Frozen (2013).
• The Disney adaptation of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which was released in 1951, was actually planned all the way back in the 1930s. The film was much closer to the original book, and the storyboards that were completed were very grotesque and quite dark. This version was scrapped due to the art style being deemed too hard to animate, issues translating the structure to a three act movie, and the arrival of World War II limiting Disney’s manpower. The Alice in Wonderland ride at Disneyland contains a subtle homage to this early treatment: a signpost topped by the head of the Mad Hatter.
• According to various interviews during his lifetime, when Osamu Tezuka first met Walt Disney during the 1964 New York World's Fair, he and Walt were considering collaborating on a film together. However, the idea quickly died after Walt himself died two years later. Tezuka later documented part of Walt's conversation during a 1981 issue of Sawayaka magazine in Japan.
• At one point, Disney was working on an animated adaptation of Giuseppe Verdi's opera Aida, with Elton John working on the lyrics. The project was cancelled in the late 90's. If it had been released, it would be the first Disney movie based on an opera. Instead, Disney adapted it to Broadway as a musical.
• An adaptation of Hansel and Gretel with songs written by the Sherman Brothers was planned at one point. One of its' songs, "Chin Up", would be used for Charlotte's Web.
• There was a planned Disney adaptation of Mort that never made it past the first offical meeting in 2010. Somehow already a Troubled Production (Terry Pratchett's publishers were against it, and his American agent thought he should have been more involved in arranging it) the meeting lasted just long enough for Terry to learn that Disney would own merchandising rights for the book, and all characters, locations and concepts appearing in the book. Or, to put it another way most of Discworld. One Disney lawyer reportedly said being shouted at was part of the job, but he'd never been screamed at before.
• Meet the Robinsons director Stephen J Anderson's last film pitch at Disney was Nyx, a story of the goddess of night dealing with the dawn of artificial light in the early 20th century. After several drafts and a failed table read, the project fell apart.

Disney Sequels

• Before Disney pulled the plug on their Direct to Video sequels in early 2006, Disneytoon Studios had sequels for Dumbo, Pinocchio, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, The Aristocats, and even a third The Jungle Book under consideration:
  • The Dumbo sequel, in particular, went far enough into development to get a preview trailer that showcased some concept art. According to the trailer, it would have been an Immediate Sequel taking place shortly after the original movie and would revolve around Dumbo and other young circus animals accidentally getting separated from the circus and going on The Homeward Journey through a nearby city. In addition to Timothy, Dumbo would be joined by a group of new characters, each representing children in different stages of development. These characters are Claude & Lolly, twin circus bears who focus on getting things done quickly (which inevitably complicates things); Dot, a Constantly Curious zebra; Godfry, a hippo who's slightly older than the other young animals and seeks to be independent; and Penny, an Attention Whore ostrich who is jealous of Dumbo's overnight fame and his ability to fly.
  • There were plans for "The Aristocats II", which was supposed to be a direct-to-video sequel. While the first film had the kittens’ nemesis as a misguided butler intent on stealing their fortune, the sequel pit them against a jewel thief on the open seas aboard a luxury cruise ship. There was also a young kitty love interest for Marie, who became the focal character of the film. The ship would travel to places like France, Scotland, England, Spain, etc, thus creating a new atmosphere of different places in the early 1900s.
  • The Jungle Book 3 would have seen Baloo and Shere Khan get captured and sold to a circus, with Mowgli and some of his friends coming to rescue them and Shere Khan ultimately pulling a Heel–Face Turn.
  • There were also plans for a Planes 3. Not much is known besides being about Aviation in Space.
• Bambi:
  • In the mid-80s, there were plans for a spin-off film, starring Thumper.
  • According to the book Mickey and the Gang: Classic Stories In Verse, an adaptation of the Bambi sequel book Bambi's Children was planned but never got beyond the early stages of development, though it was later made into a comic tie-in. Bambi did later receive a "sequel" in the form of the interquel Bambi II, which has no relation to Bambi's Children.

• There were plans in 1994 for an Aladdin sequel movie involving pirates that got as far as having music commissioned. A different 1994 direct-to-video film called Aladdin: The Return of Jafar, which was a Pilot Movie for Aladdin: The Series, was released instead.
• Hercules 2: The Trojan War was a proposed sequel for Hercules, set post-film and having Hercules join the Greek army after his old friend Helen is captured by Paris of Troy. A story based on the Trojan War, but with a completely different plot, would end up being featured in prequel series Hercules: The Animated Series.
• Atlantis: The Lost Empire was planned to have a sequel called Shards of Chaos, which was canceled because Atlantis wasn't as profitable as Disney expected.
• A sequel to Treasure Planet ended up canceled due to the film's poor box office performance. More information here.
• Meet the Robinsons almost had a sequel called Meet the Robinsons 2: The First Date.
• Chicken Little would have had a sequel titled Chicken Little 2: The Ugly Duckling Story, which was scrapped early on in development.
• Cuban Carnival was a proposed sequel to Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros. It would have introduced a fourth Caballero; a Cuban rooster named Miguelito Maracas. Poor box office for The Three Caballeros and the end of the Good Neighbor Policy that inspired the films in the first place meant it was shelved.
• There were supposed to be two more Disney Fairies films after Legend of the NeverBeast. Nothing ever came of the seventh film due to problems with the story, and the eighth film was cancelled as well by proxy. Disneytoon Studios would be shuttered not long afterward.

Live-Action Films

• Mary Poppins almost received a sequel in The '80s, rather than The New '10s. In 1987, Disney proposed to P.L. Travers, the author of the Mary Poppins books, a movie in which Mary Poppins becomes nanny to the children of either Jane or Michael Banks. Mrs. Travers and her friend, children's literature historian Brian Sibley, instead submitted an outline set "a little while" later, featuring Mary Poppins again taking care of Jane and Michael, as well as their new baby siblings, John and Barbara. It mostly relied on chapters of the first three books that Walt Disney didn't feature in his movie, along with a subplot about the bank co-run by George Banks having financial troubles. The Banks kids would have also met Bert's brother, Barney - a role that at least one Disney executive suggested giving to Michael Jackson. Disney later revived the idea for a sequel in September 2015, which went back to the idea of Mary Poppins becoming a nanny to Michael's children, and three years later, it hit theaters.
• In 2003 Disney announced a live-action version of The Sword in the Stone. Nothing ever came out of it, and a completely different live-action remake was announced in 2015.
• A sequel to Enchanted, with the working title Disenchanted, has floated around several times since the first movie was released. Proposed release dates in 2011 and 2018 came and went with no announcements beyond director Adam Shankman stating that there's a script that everyone's happy with. This has since been Saved from Development Hell.
• A sequel/prequel to Who Framed Roger Rabbit. One was attempted during, but floundered due to many problems at Disney, with Steven Spielberg, problems converting the characters to CGI, and a skyrocketing budget. Attempts to make a sequel anyway continue to be discussed, but Roger Rabbit remains one of the biggest film properties to never be properly capitalized. But between Bob Hoskins' retirement from acting in 2012 and his passing in 2014, it's unlikely to ever materialize (unless it's a prequel). The second film was also planned to take place during WWII and involve a bunch of wacky Nazis, which Spielberg outright refused, as he felt he couldn't satirize Nazis after making Schindler's List.
  • With the original book's author Gary K. Wolf set to terminate Disney's rights to the IP under copyright law, the sequel may end up being made at another studio.
• In 2017, it was announced that a sequel to Sky High (2005) was in development. Nothing else has been announced since then.

Live Action Television

• Little Mermaid's Island was a 1990 collab project between Jim Henson and Disney. It was a television series starring a live action Ariel (played by Marietta Deprima), a live-action Grimbsy (played by Clive Revill), and puppet animals. It featured a new character named Sandy, who was Flounder's twin sister, and would also be one of Jim's last projects. The series was planned to be a daily series with four songs per episode, but only two episodes were ever produced. The character of Sandy did end up having a prominent role in a series of spin-off books about the franchise.

Pixar

• In the early 1990s, Pixar decided to make a Christmas Special in order to prove that they could make a full-length film, titled A Tin Toy Christmas, starring Tinny from their short Tin Toy. Tinny was a part of a Christmas toy line from the 1940s, but due to poor sales, he and his friends were put into storage. Tinny fell into a deep sleep only to awake years later in a modern-day mega store during December. With the help of a sarcastic ventriloquist dummy, he tries to find his friends on Christmas Eve. This concept was then altered into a feature film, which became Toy Story (the ventriloquist dummy eventually became Woody). The concept came full circle when Pixar made a Toy Story Christmas special titled Toy Story That Time Forgot.
• Brad Bird's 1906, a live-action adaptation of the 2004 novel based upon the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, was picked up by Disney, Pixar, and Warner Brothers. The film had a $200 million budget, and the huge cost caused the film to get pushed back and rewritten numerous times by Bird in order to lessen the film's scope. Eventually, Pixar and Disney dropped the project over lack of confidence, and Bird left production as well, leaving only Warner to carry the film and its future unknown.
• Before he directed Toy Story 3, Lee Unkrich came up with the idea for a untitled film that "had similar elements with The Secret Life of Pets".
• Newt, Gary Rydstrom's directorial debut, was about two newts (Newt the spoiled & pampered male, and Brooke the streetwise female) who are the last of their species and are put together in a community college biology lab in order to Mate or Die. Many have speculated it was canceled due to Crest Animation's Alpha and Omega and Blue Sky's Rio being released earlier, which have very similar plots but with different animals.

Western Animation

• Disney's Dwarves was a spinoff about the Seven Dwarves from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs that never came out. Years later, Disney made The 7D, which is very loosely based on the same idea.
• Several Disney Direct to Video sequels were actually supposed to be TV shows for their respective films:
  • Cinderella II: Dreams Come True consists of episodes from a cancelled TV show of Cinderella.
  • Beauty and the Beast: Belle's Magical World consists of episodes from a cancelled TV show of Beauty and the Beast.
  • Atlantis: Milo's Return is made up of episodes from a cancelled Team Atlantis cartoon. The show got a bit farther in production than the others, as a Gargoyles crossover episode was in the works.
• There were plans for an "Aristocats: The Animated Series" way back in 2003. Marie and her brothers Berlioz, and Toulouse would be turned into teenagers◊, and Marie (who was supposed to be the main character of this show) would've been given someone new to bounce off of. They invented a teenage cat similar to O'Malley the alley cat, called Delancey, who could dance like a combination of Justin Timberlake and Usher. And then, to round out the cast, "The Street Cats" were created. The basic idea here was to reinvent "The Aristocats" so that this franchise would then appeal to your typical Disney Channel/Toon Disney watcher, but when Disney bought Pixar in 2006, it was cancelled along with the planned sequel to the film.
• An animated series based off of the A Tale of... books was planned for Disney+, but it was cancelled for being too dark and too expensive.
• Treasure Planet was planned to have a TV series at one point.
• In 2004, an animated series called Mulan and the Treasure of Qin was mentioned, but it never came out.

Merchandise

• There were originally plans to induct Elsa and Anna into the Disney Princess line in 2013 and the two were featured on Princess merchandise and the site early on. However, presumably due to the sheer success of Frozen, Disney would seemingly abandon this plan in favor of making Frozen an individual Cash-Cow Franchise instead, with Frozen merchandise becoming separated from the Disney Princess branding (as shown by this official ad◊) and Elsa and Anna being removed from the roster on the Disney Princess website. Despite this, Elsa and Anna appear alongside the princesses in Ralph Breaks the Internet and the two were included in Disney's "The Ultimate Princess Celebration" campaign in 2021-2022.
• During the Summer of 2018, Disney announced a new character brand called Disney Animals which focused on animals from various Disney Animated Films (notably The Jungle Book, Dumbo, Bambi, The Aristocats, 101 Dalmatians, and Lady and the Tramp) similar to the Disney Princess and Disney Villains lines. It was first announced at "Rendez-vous Des Partenaires" (aka RDVDisney) in France by Sarah Cohen on July 5th, 2018 and planned to launch in 2019. Disney Animals was aimed at the unisex demographic unlike the Disney Princess brand. Once 2019 came around, the line has never been rolled out with Disney remaining radio silent on the brand. As of 2022, Disney has yet to give any updates on the brand.

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