The classic Disney movie that ripped off John Landis: “I was pretty pissed off”
John Landis is remembered for making cutting-edge comedies that worked transgressive humour into the mainstream, but he’s long held a grudge against Walt Disney Pictures for taking advantage of his work on a future animated classic.
There’s no shortage of controversies involving the director, who ended up feuding with many of his most acclaimed collaborators. Despite the nasty reputation he’s earned after burning far too many bridges, Landis is among the most influential comedy filmmakers of the 21st century, without whose groundbreaking work on Animal House, Trading Places, Coming to America, and An American Werewolf in London, it’s unlikely that comedy cinema would be in the same place that it is today.
While Landis’ greatest films became some of the most popular of their respective years of release, he also helmed more than a few duds that were met with muted responses. Spies Like Us was an attempt to spoof espionage movies like James Bond that simply fell flat, despite the presence of comedic geniuses like Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase. Similarly, Beverly Hills Cop III was such a legendary disaster that it effectively killed one of the most successful blockbuster franchises of all time for over three decades, as it wasn’t until 2024’s Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F that Eddie Murphy reprised his most famous role to some acclaim.
If critics were unsparing in their assessment of the two failed features, the director at least had the benefit of using the films as an excuse to work with one of his heroes, where both featured a cameo from Ray Harryhausen, the legendary animator who helped pioneer the development of stop-motion creatures and spectacle films, such as Jason and the Argonauts, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, and It Came From Beneath the Sea to ignite the imaginations of many young moviegoers.
Landis’ obsession with Harryhausen went beyond casting him, as he also intended to remake one of his most beloved classics, and while he did not have any prior experience working on a purely animated film, he had planned for a version of Sinbad that would use cutting-edge visual effects. However, once the funding fell apart and Landis dropped his investment in the project, many of his animators from it instead shifted their efforts to backing a different film.
According to an interview with The Films That Changed My Life, many of Landis’ “animators went over to Disney and made Aladdin using our characters”, which he admitted to being “pretty pissed off” about.
That the remake film fell apart isn’t surprising, and not just because of the toxic track record he’d earned towards the middle period of his career, but also because animation had been in a fallow period throughout the 1980s, and even a studio as reliable as Disney had released a few commercial disasters like The Black Cauldron and The Brave Little Toaster. Desperately seeking a win, it was Aladdin, alongside other key films like The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, that helped to revive the medium in a new era that would be dubbed ‘The Disney Renaissance’.
In fairness to Landis, Aladdin may have had some similarities to what he’d planned for Sinbad, with both titular characters derived from Middle Eastern folklore that went on magical adventures across the desert. However, his animators also can’t be blamed for finding a more lucrative deal with Disney, particularly in the wake of a series of misfires that he had directed. Not to say that Landis couldn’t have made an interesting Sinbad film, but the animation community definitely benefited from the project’s collapse, which brought about one of the most prolific periods in its history.
