The Mouse House is working hard to produce a range of exciting original content for its upcoming Disney Plus streaming service. Not only will the studio raid its biggest franchises for potential – see: Marvel and Star Wars – but it’s also looking to dig into its own rich cinematic history to produce some new TV shows. Case in point, it’s been reported that a series starring Disney’s rogues gallery of classic villains is in development.
Production Weekly broke the news, confirming that Once Upon a Time‘s Steve Pearlman and Quantico‘s Michael Seitzman are attached to exec produce. Production is slated to get underway in the second quarter of 2020 and the show will film in Ardmore Studios in Dublin, Ireland (previously the home of TV series such as Penny Dreadful).
It seems like Disney’s recently realized the potential in crossing over its most popular animated characters. The Kingdom Hearts games have been doing it for years, of course, but just last year we got the princesses teaming up in Ralph Breaks the Internet. Plus, the Descendants TV movies have done something similar, as has ABC’s Once Upon a Time. As such, Pearlman should be a safe pair of hands for this project.
There’s no plot details about the Disney villains show yet, so we don’t know exactly how the writers will approach a series starring the bad guys. They could go the Maleficent route, which painted the once-evil witch as a wronged, misunderstood anti-hero, or else pitch it as a sort of anti-Avengers, with the likes of Captain Hook, Jafar, Scar and Ursula uniting to form a super league of villains.
We’ll just have to wait and see, but in the meantime, we know that other TV series coming to Disney Plus include Loki, The Mandalorian and Vision and the Scarlet Witch, with a lot more in various stages of development. Suffice it to say, when the streaming service debuts later this year, it’s going to have a ton of great content.