Disney's live-action 'Mulan' will reportedly feature a new love interest — and fans aren't happy
Given the blockbuster success of Disney’s live-action re-dos of Cinderella ($201 million domestic box-office) and Beauty the Beast ($504 million domestic box-office), hopes are extremely high for the studio’s next adaptation of their animated classics — Mulan, which is set to arrive in theaters in 2019. However, a new development regarding the eagerly-anticipated project has put a dent in that prior optimism.
saddened to report it’s basically been confirmed that li shang will not be in the live-action mulan.
the mulan casting call has been confirmed to be accurate. donnie yen was cast as “commander tung,” who is in the description for “chen honghui.”
rest in peace bisexual icon. pic.twitter.com/7El8TDhJg5
— nerdy (@nerdyasians) April 16, 2018
As evidenced by the casting call featured in the above tweet, the character of Li Shang appears to have been cut from the upcoming live-action Mulan. Since Li Shang is heroine Mulan’s love interest in in the original movie, this means that director Niki Caro’s (Whale Rider, The Zookeeper’s Wife) upcoming film will be radically making over its central romance — which will now apparently involve a fellow army recruit named Chen Honghui. Moreover, because Chen Honghui will supposedly only fall for Mulan after he learns that she’s a woman (because to join the military, she poses as a man), this also means that the bisexual subtext brought to the beloved animated film by Li Shang — who seems to be interested in Mulan before he discovers that she’s actually a she — may also now be gone.
Especially in light of prior reports that the movie’s original songs have also been excised from this new take on the material, this latest potential change hasn’t sat well with fans.
I STILL have a crush on Li Shang, 20 year later. If he's not in, I'm not in. pic.twitter.com/BLs597iQta
— Sergeant Snarky (@grandmaitsme00) April 16, 2018
i’m disgusted. disney is obviously still mad they accidentally made li shang bisexual, so they’re REMOVING ANY POSSIBILITY that “chen” is seen as bisexual. they make it clear he HATES mulan the whole time she’s presenting male. he bullies her up until he finds out she’s a woman.
— princess mizzy (@hellomizzyy) April 16, 2018
Furious. Darn near every @Disney movie makes a billion dollars these days, they can take any risk they want. Instead, they erase one of the main characters because they accidentally implied that he was bi – which, of course, is bi erasure.
— Alejandro José Vásquez (@TheRADDman) April 17, 2018
They just removed all the nuance from the character. Even if you ignore the bi subtext, Shang began to admire and respect Ping well before finding out she was a woman. Honghui's development however sounds very one-dimensional.
— Amina (@AminaJansz) April 16, 2018
Disney has yet to confirm these alterations — or to address the burning question of whether Mushu, the fiery dragon sidekick voiced by Eddie Murphy in the animated film, will also factor into these modernized proceedings. What the studio has officially announced, however, is that Mulan will be played by Chinese actress Liu Yifei (also known as Crystal Liu), and that Chinese superstar Donnie Yen — most recently seen stateside in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and xXx: The Return of Xander Cage — will be playing Mulan’s mentor, Commander Tung.
Jurassic World’s Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver are presently rewriting the script for Mulan, which has yet to set a firm 2019 release date — meaning there’s still plenty of time for Disney to address the reasons behind these increasingly controversial changes.
Read more from Yahoo Entertainment:
