Book Of Enchantment

Times have changed.  While older generations may have booed and hissed at the villains in movies, modern audiences have learned that there are two sides to every story, even fairy tales, and the Disney villains’ popularity has skyrocketed, with the likes of Maleficent, the Evil Queen, Ursula and Cruella de Vil appearing on nearly as much merchandising as their heroic nemeses.  Prepare to delve even deeper to the dark side, as Disney+ has apparently been concocting a TV series based on Serena Valentino’s ‘Book of Enchantment’ series of novels.

Production Weekly shared information about this series on Twitter:

Writer Michael Seitzman is adapting the books and will produce through his Disney-based Maniac Productions, with ABC Signature Studios.  So far, Valentino has penned five novels in the series, ‘The Fairest of All: A Tale of the Wicked Queen’, ‘The Beast Within: A Tale of Beauty’s Prince’, ‘Poor Unfortunate Soul: A Tale of the Sea Witch’, ‘Mistress of All Evil: A Tale of the Dark Fairy’, and ‘Mother Knows Best: A Tale of the Old Witch’ ( featuring Mother Gothel, released exclusively through Target).  Valentino has ‘The Odd Sisters: A Villains Novel’ due in July and an unknown seventh book in the works.  That tagline for this series is “Evil is Made, Not Born,” reinforcing the “two sides to every story” idea.

Disney has previously explored the redemption of its villains on ‘Once Upon a Time’, which ran for seven seasons on ABC.  It has also struck gold with the ‘Descendants’ TV movies, which focus on the children of the villains and heroes.  In those movies, the villains are still evil, while their kids struggle to be good.  ‘Descendants 3’ airs this summer on Disney Channel.  And of course, ‘Maleficent’, starring Angelina Jolie was a massive theatrical hit in 2014.  It was the highest-grossing non-superhero movie of that year.  A sequel is in the works.

Though not a Disney project, perhaps all of these owe their existence to the Broadway musical ‘Wicked’ based on the novel by Gregory Maguire, which told the story of ‘The Wizard of Oz’ from the perspective of the Wicked Witch, whose real name is revealed to be Elphaba.

Seitzman previously created and wrote the series ‘Intelligence’ and ‘Code Black’.  Most recently, he penned episodes of ‘Quantico’.  He is currently developing a shared universe of shows for Hulu, based on the novels of John Grisham.

What do you think?  Will you be signing up for Disney+ to check out ‘Book of Enchantment’?

Source: The Hollywood Reporter