When Dan Trachtenberg turns to a fairy tale, you can expect something that looks familiar—and then refuses to stay in its lane. Deadline reports the Prey director is developing an original film inspired by Sleeping Beauty for Disney, a fresh retelling that’s still in early development and deliberately keeping most plot details under wraps.
Trachtenberg shaped the new story idea with Rina McClendon, while Alex Anfanger and Dan Schimpf have been tapped to write the screenplay. On the producing side, Trachtenberg teams with longtime partner Ben Rosenblatt and Star Wars producer Michelle Rejwan. Jessica Virtue serves as executive production lead and Alina Mota is on board as creative director, with the project moving forward under the umbrella of Disney’s live-action leadership, Daria Chercek.
This incarnation is not connected to Angelina Jolie’s Maleficent films. That distinction matters. Trachtenberg and Disney are pitching something original, not a sequel or a spin-off of what came before.
Why does this feel promising? Because Trachtenberg has a track record of retooling familiar properties into unexpected successes. His Hulu hit Prey revived Predator for a new generation, earning strong critical praise and an Emmy nomination for outstanding television movie. He followed that with Predator: Badlands and produced the animated Predator: Killer of Killers for Hulu, which scored an impressive 94 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. The three Predator projects linked to Trachtenberg sit among the franchise’s highest-rated entries.
He’s also quietly busy elsewhere, currently in pre-production on a tightly held project for Paramount. But for Disney fans who grew up on the sleeping princess myth, this new take signals a company still willing to let bold filmmakers reimagine the canon. Expect surprises. Keep an eye on casting reports; everything else is likely to stay sealed a little longer.
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